http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created-ebook/dp/B004G606EY

Unbelievably interesting book. check it out.

he talks about it.

op is slightly off. when all the natives died from disease, tons of eastern forest regrew and pushed europe into a mini ice age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#Decreased_human_populations

again, unbelievably good book, check it out

Edit: Adding some sources

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/EI157.1

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/january7/manvleaf-010709.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4755328.stm

I recommend a book Bad Samaritans about how developed countries made their problems even bigger.

Africa had hard time developing for example because western banks constantly enable capital flight from those poor countries. Developed countries forced underdeveloped countries to open the markets for many goods but at the same time they maintain very high tariffs on products they could export like food. Blaming everything on African warlords while forgetting about post-colonial practices of exploitation and imposing failed economic ideas is very dishonest.

An invisible hook! http://www.amazon.com/The-Invisible-Hook-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095

This is the only one of these comments I'm going to respond to, because I wrote this three days ago, for ONE PERSON, and all you /r/bestof armchair jackasses can seriously take a flying fucking leap 'cuz I've got a shuttle to watch, but since I said one let's break it down:

>We face unique problems today, namely the fact that we've expanded pretty much to the limit of what the natural world can support, particularly in terms of energy.

This is not unique. This has been argued since Malthus 200+ years ago. The current world-is-ending fad dates to The Limits to Growth, a book published 40 years ago. Thing about LtG, though, is it used computer simulations and five scenarios to run some numbers and put some math to the problem. One of their models appears to be pretty close to what's happened but even the Club of Rome doesn't think it's spot-fucking-on. So while people who actually study this stuff think that there are conclusions to be drawn and problems to solve, they

a) are hardly settled on the scope of the issue or approaches to take

b) don't insist that high school kids worried about WWIII focus on it.

>This pretty much guarantees that the economy will stop growing and begin to contract in the near future

Economies have been expanding and contracting throughout history. Rogoff and Reinhart make a pretty compelling case that we're in uncharted territory but nobody - nobody is proclaiming the end of the world except wise-cracking Keyboard Kommandos such as yourself.


>Our currencies, which are now all but entirely fiat, are only designed to work in an expanding economy

This is a nonsensical statement unworthy of rebuttal. If you can HFT Forex, currencies are not "entirely flat."

>So the OP is right, I believe, to fear a financial collapse, as it is more or less a mathematical certainty at this point.

This isn't about whether or not the OP is right or wrong, this is giving OP tools to deal with his anxiety. As I hope is becoming clear, I feel myself qualified to do so. I cannot say the same for you.

>WWIII? Who knows.

Who knows? Most people. People who have studied the problem. My statement (no heavy combatants in 70 years) is factual. Your deflection is speculative and does not add to the conversation.

>I haven't even mentioned global warming, which is way more depressing if you follow the science to its logical conclusion.

GLOBAL WARMING WAS NOT LISTED AS A CONCERN BY OP.

We could talk science there, too. I've studied the problem to my satisfaction. Have you? Or are you just waving your hands?

>I don't advise the OP to lie awake at night worrying, but I don't think anyone should assume the future will be like the past just because it has been before.

Who are you making your point to? What I said is that by and large, the world is in pretty good shape. What you said is "WWIII? Who knows."

>If you wanna talk about history, though, remember that every empire in history has fallen.

OP did not say "I'm worried about my empire." He said "I'm worried about WWIII." I've worked with a number of talented and skilled ex-Soviet scientists and regime members. They're all doing fine, CCCP-be-damned.

>Don't waste your time worrying. Prepare for what you can prepare for and let fate handle the rest.

Got it. You just wanted to listen to yourself talk.

Hey, /r/bestof friend: This question was asked, and answered handily by a number of erudite people other than myself, three days ago. This is a quiet place, a respectful place, and the situation is handled. Now do everyone a solid and keep your muddy boots off this holy place. And tell all your friends. There's nothing quite like a default sub coming in and retconning a sensitive discussion because every worldly 15-year-old needs to hear himself type.

First, thanks for reading, man! I really appreciate your thoughtful response. I'm a fan of Noah, too.

To your point: I agree with a lot of what you said. Stussy and Supreme have both been around for a minute, and each weathered a trend shift or two in their own right (90's skate/surf -> 00's maximalism). Union LA is an especially great example - it's the same genetics (edgy, effortless, inaccessible "youth culture"), just a different expression.

However, I would add one thing: at the risk of sounding too "this time is different", I think the economics of this situation make it relatively unique in terms of past trend cycles. There's A LOT of fast money chasing overvalued assets for nothing other than arbitrage (sneakers, Supreme, etc) and that alone adds an element of risk past just "this shit's now wack."

Someone should write a book about this phenomenon.

The book below is a fantastic read that directly addresses your question...

The shortest version is ports (anywhere) are a function of the economy, the local labor market, and the entire supply chain of delivering "stuff" from A-to-B.

​

Once containerization took over post-war, the economics quickly and irreversibly shifted in favor of inland factories.

​

So no more factories in New York City meant there was no need to maintain and service the piers to bring raw materials to those factories. The factories were only built adjacent to the piers because it was so time consuming and expensive to transfer raw materials. (Even the layout of Manhattan's "grid" of streets took this into account, with the avenues more tightly spaced on the coasts than in the middle of the island. This allowed for good to move more efficiently between factories as they came off the ships.)

​

Now, what do I mean by "take over"? I'd have to read the book again, but I recall containerization allowed for moving most goods at, without hyperbole, ~10% the cost of traditional break bulk shipping. If it could fit inside a container, you could move it for really, really cheap. No one involved in shipping could ignore the economic advantages of containerization. And those who tried to resist slowly bled out as "the box" took over.

​

(Break bulk is where individual pieces are carried on/off a ship. Think "On The Waterfront" and a bunch of people carrying bags on their shoulders. With containers, what previous could take a week could be done in less than a day.)

​

You'll note the shipping actually increased too...but it shifted to New Jersey, which constructed new piers better suited to containerization rather than break bulk shipping. By the time Manhattan and Brooklyn tried to make new piers, it was too...the containerization infrastructure was in place on the mainland.

​

But what about the longshore men? Did they have jobs to do after the piers went away? Well...automation is always rough on manual labor. Lots of longshore men lost their jobs. Crane operators were the new king. The book is an interesting history lesson in the history of American labor/management relationships, particularly in how containerization was handled differently in New York vs. San Francisco, and even Manhattan/Brooklyn vs. Newark.

​

Here's a link to the book if anyone is interested. It's well written for even a novice and consumable for a non-academic. The writing style is not overly dry either. There is a narrative to understand. The bibliography is huge too. It's basically the history of shipping "stuff", which in turn answers the question "When and why did Manhattan's ports go away?"

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger By: Marc Levinson

​

EDIT: I'll add that any actual historians can perhaps comment in better detail. But if you want a resource to answer your question, and then some, this book is tailored to do so.

Lmao, sure thing guy...

> leading to mass suffering.

You are 100% delusional. You have a disease, and the only cure is for you to educate yourself. Since your ideas thus far are incorrect, I’d suggest starting with this book. Let me know when you’re finished and we can go from there.

This recession was coming either way. The economy never actually recovered from the last recession because the core problems of bad loans and inflation were not only unaddressed, but worsened. The economy isn’t built on fucking spending. It’s ridiculous that this is what mainstream “economists” think. An economy grows through savings and production, and everything the Fed does to try to fix a struggling economy only worsens malinvestment. Recessions happen not because spending is low, they happen because malinvestment is high and real savings are low (which in turn cause spending to dip, but you actually want that in that situation). You can’t just drive consumption and have that manifest a stronger economy. It’s about as legitimate as alchemy.


Edit: wow, I’m actually getting upvoted :). I wonder how many of those upvotes would’ve been downvotes had I explicitly mentioned that I’m arguing for Austrian economics. If anyone interested in learning how the economy actually works, here are steps One, Two, and Three.

A lot of this is based on their history and what they learned.

From the Opium Wars, learned firsthand what can happen when foreign companies become too powerful and exploit the fuck out of the locals. So when the Communists came to power, they made sure this could never happen again by requiring majority Chinese ownership.

This is no longer the case anymore though. These days, companies are allowed to be majority foreign owned, but behind the scenes, if you want to really succeed, then you'll need a Chinese partner.

The second thing they learned is to see how protectionist policies, and even outright IP theft, helped Western countries grow.

And of course more recently, the "Asian tigers" of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (add in Japan as well).

So they learned to emulate the policies of these countries.

For those interested in learning more, check the book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

"Technological unemployment" reminds me of the "Joe Smith" example from Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson:

>...some writers [have gone] to the extreme of looking only at the immediate effects [of new technologies] on certain groups. Joe Smith is thrown out of a job by the introduction of some machine. "Keep your eye on Joe Smith," these writers insist. "Never lose track of Joe Smith." But what they then proceed to do is keep their eyes only on Joe Smith, and to forget Tom Jones, who has just got a new job in making the new machine, and Ted Brown, who has just got a job operating one, and Daisy Miller, who can now buy a coat for half what is used to cost her. And because they think only of Joe Smith, they end by advocating reactionary and nonsensical policies. (p. 59)

I'd be interested in hearing opposing views to this, however.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Or read it online (just Google "Economics in One Lesson" )

> The world probably won't go crazy, but there will be some who will act against other.

Nozick's Anarchy State and Utopia draws on (and critiques) the work of so-called "anarcho-capitalists" (also called "market anarchists" and "individualist anarchists") like Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Murray Rothbard, and David Friedman.

Market anarchists argue that the problem you identify - the possibility of widespread violence that could accompany the "power vacuum" of a stateless society - is solved by social coordination and market forces.

Put briefly (and oversimplified): In a stateless society, people would fear for their safety, and they would form protective associations that provide the police, military, and judicial functions normally handled by states. The only difference is that these "protective associations" would work on the basis of individual consent, like a club. You would not be "born into" membership in a protective association as you are today born into citizenship in a state. You could enter it and leave it on mutually agreeable terms. Associations might charge members for protection or require that members protect (and not assault) each other. Surely, they argue, the market for protection from the threat of violence would be as strong as the markets for other essentials like food and shelter.

If this seems risky, the market anarchists argue, that's only because you've trained yourself not to notice the considerable risks that come with state monopolies on the exercise of power. States oppress, abuse, invade, steal, and murder all the time. It's just that their doing so is the norm, and we've either been sheltered from it because of our extraordinary luck, or we've ceased to notice it. This is an example of the "nirvana fallacy" according to the anarchists, because we are comparing an ideal state (Norway) to a hellish caricature of anarchism (Somalia).

There are several common critiques of this argument. Here are a few:

1. Nozick himself argues that the market anarchist's approach is unsustainable. Markets for protective associations, he argues, have an inherent tendency to "collapse" into monopolies, because nobody has any incentive to be a member of the second-best protective association in their region. The strongest protective association eventually absorbs all of its competitors, and it becomes an "ultra-minimal state." The argument gets a little bit more complicated at this point, but the upshot according to Nozick is that ultra-minimal states (monopolistic protective associations) have the moral obligation to become full-fledged "minimal states" which require all of the people in a region to sign up, contribute taxes, and participate in mutual policing and protection schemes.
   
   
2. Economists like Milton Friedman (father of David, mentioned above) argue that this sort of anarchism is unsustainable simply because the goods in the market for protection are "public goods." Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. That means that you can't easily stop somebody from enjoying a public good without killing them, and the use of a public good by one person doesn't keep anybody else from using it simultaneously. Police protection, for example, is a public good because my enjoyment of police protection doesn't stop you from simultaneously enjoying police protection, and everybody in the jurisdiction of a police force benefits from that police force's presence whether or not they pay to support that force. Friedman and others have argued that full-fledged states are the only entities capable of providing for public goods. Markets can't do it - in fact, when markets try to do it, what occurs is one example of a phenomenon called "market failure." Other examples of public goods include atmospheric oxygen, knowledge, military protection, justice, and flood levees.
   
   
3. There's an historical argument against market anarchism, and this seems the most similar to your concerns. At least one of two things holds true of every society that has come close to market anarchism: That society has been a miserable place to live, and/or that society eventually evolved into a stable nation-state. Consider this an attempt to turn the "nirvana fallacy" argument against the anarchists: The anarchists are imagining an ideal anarchic state instead of the more likely and less appealing Somalian outcome. Market anarchists claim that this response is specious. They argue that market anarchism has worked in certain contexts, as with 18th-century pirate codes and Medieval Iceland. They also argue that the misery of many stateless societies would only be made worse by the presence of a state. Finally, they claim that it is not a good argument against a political ideal to say that that political ideal has never been tried in its purest form.

Further Reading

Michael Huermer - 'The Problem of Political Authority':

[Hard Copy]

Henry Hazlitt - 'Economics in One Lesson':

[Audiobook]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

David Friedman - 'The Machinery of Freedom'"

[Illustrated Summary]:[Audiobook]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Ludwig von Mises - 'Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth':

[Audiobook]:[PDF]:[ePub]


MisesWiki - Economic Calculation Problem:

[HTML]

Murray N. Rothbard - 'For a New Liberty':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Murray N. Rothbard - 'The Ethics of Liberty':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Frédéric Bastiat - 'The Law':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Ludwig von Mises - 'Human Action':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF:[ePub]:[Hard Copy]

Murray N. Rothbard - 'Man Economy and State, with Power, and Markets':

[Audiobook][HTML]:[PDF]:[ePub]:[Hard Copy]

I started out by writing one of those long, line-by-line response comments, but who wants to read that?

Instead, I'll try to get the heart of the subject. I'll start with a quote by arch-libertarian Murray Rothbard.

> It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

What I'm seeing in this post is a loud, vociferous opinion about the economics of libertarianism when you have clearly only had a surface-level encounter with the ideology. Heck, you seem to only have a surface-level acquaintance with your own ideology.

Some books for you to look at:

• Why Government Doesn't Work, by Harry Browne
  
• The Myth of the Robber Barons, by Burt Folsom
  
• Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt
  
• Capitalism and the Historians, by F.A. Hayek
  
• The Law, by Frederic Bastiat
  
• The Privatization of Roads and Highways, by Walter Block
  
  Note how these are available as free downloads. Most of us don't believe in "intellectual property," so that subject might be of interest to you in Against Intellectual Monopoly.
  
  The short version is this: No, we're not out to get you. Yes, we see many of your sacred cows as expendable in the pursuit of human liberty. Yes, we've thought long and hard about this (for a couple hundred years actually), and No, this isn't just some scam to help the Koch brothers.
  
  I'm not sure what part of your view I'm supposed to be changing here, but you need to know a lot more about your own position and the one you're attacking first, so enjoy the reading list.

If you're interested, here's a great book: "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly." It's about exactly this phenomenon. The people who are getting rich always think that their success is because they are smarter than other people and they've figured out what went wrong last time. It's part of an essential fallacy wherein people attribute their successes to their own efforts/genius and externalize their failures.

Actually, nobody should be afraid of anyone.

Most politicians are good people, and they joined politics because they wanted to change the world for the better. But they got stuck in the debt-based system. Just like everybody else. This leaves very little room for real change.

Everybody wants out of this system. But most don't realise, or don't know how.

Perhaps you've seen Oliver Stone's Nixon. There's this scene where president Nixon meets a bunch of young people, and they give him shit for Vietnam etc. He then realises that he was just like those kids twenty years prior, but once in office he simply wasn't left with much choice - he had to act like he did, that's what the system required him to do. (Stone's message, not mine - although I agree.)

Nobody is out to get us right now, nobody is our enemy, everybody realises that the banking system is shit at best, or downright evil at worst. Including most politicians. All we need is a way out.

Recommended books:

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Good-Evil-Economic-Gilgamesh/dp/0199767203

http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381395901&sr=1-1&keywords=debt

http://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global-Crisis/dp/1591845564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381395926&sr=1-1&keywords=currency+wars

And please read these articles:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-30/bitcoin-the-perfect-schmuck-insurance.html

http://rt.com/op-edge/bitcoin-money-future-fad-761/

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/20125309437931677.html

I'm not sure if you're getting this from David Graeber or not, but he addresses the issue in Debt: The First 5000 Years. His answer is a very clear "no".

EDITED: Fixed the errors

Great post OP! I haven't seen the video in question (sorry) but as an anarchist I do feel confident in giving some of my views. First off, there are no right answers to these questions. Even within the same school of anarco-socialism, you'll likely get different answers to these questions from different people (ask 10 anarcho-socialists and you'll get 11 different answers) and in my view, that's a strength, not a weakness. However because I haven't seen the video, I don't know how much of what I'm about to say is addressed by it. I'm sorry!

I personally don't believe that lazy workers are as much a problem as you believe they will be and I base this on my personal experience. I have visited anarco-communes and also "temporary utopias" like climate camps and anti-globalization convergences. And, no, they were by no means perfect. In anarchist households dishes often don't get done to the extent that it's kind of a running joke. But there are lots of reasons for that. Houses aren't designed with communal living in mind. Under capitalism most of us suffer from depression and anxiety and it's hard to be motivated with that kind of thing when you're worried about your next deadline at your unfulfilling job or paying the bills by the end of the month. A more collectivist society could do things like ensuring no one ever has to do menial jobs alone (even by the simple provision of bigger sinks and bigger kitchens--ever notice how classically houses in western society were designed for use by a single-occupancy gendered labour force; my kitchen is barely twice the size of my wardrobe, but the living room, where the man of the house was expected to spend his off-labour time, is huge). And ultimately I would expect that anarchist societies would not only have a good working understanding of the sexism of gendered labour (most menial jobs are traditionally performed by women) but also be more lenient around all labour. Like maybe you can skip the washing up for that day if it's your period or if you're nursing, both of which are labour neglected by capitalism, just to choose a stereotypical and thought-provoking example. Going back to my own experiences, there were plenty of problems with places like the convergences and anarchist camps, but they never actually suffered from not having clean toilets because people understood that cleaning them was as important an activity as any other type of labour which needed to be undertaken. Ultimately, I agree with the point raised by the WNDWU (youtube link--above): "So you're asking me, who will do the dishes when the revolution comes? Well I do my own dishes now and I'll do my own dishes then. Funny that it's always the ones who don't, who ask that fucking question."

There are a lot of different thoughts about how economics can work in anarchist societies at large-scale. Most likely there would be several different economic models, possibly even within the municipal area, but certainly within different ones. In the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a system where small consumptive goods are created in situ, then optionally exchanged as gifts with traders. Underlying this, potassium is used as an exchange of hard currency and reserve, regulating the flow of resources throughout for the production of goods the solar system. Meanwhile, Ursula Le Guin envisaged a society organised by collectives (syndicals) where work was undertaken out of a sense of duty. Less speculatively, David Graeber has done a lot of good work documenting the use of gift economies throughout human history and it's hard to believe there's nothing there, given the overwelming preponderance and importance of gift economies to advanced human societies so far.

But I myself am not an advocate of gift economies. Michael Albert and co. have done a lot of writing on how non-gift participatory or democratic economies could be run and I highly recommend checking out his work. Albert's work is pretty much the closest to what I would like to see myself, I think and he also talks a lot about the psychological benefits of job rotation, e.g. a system where doctors also clean toilets. There is also a form of anarchism known as mutualism in which productive work is carried out by coops instead of companies or conglomerates owned by shareholders or an owner or owners. A coop can be structured along purely democratic grounds, where every decision requires a consensus meeting from relevant workers, through the whole gamut to a system with middle managers and bosses basically being like a company except that the workers form and control the board instead of vice versa. After producing goods, they are exchanged through a free-market mechanism as under capitalism. I myself am not a mutualist but really even mutualism would be a huge step forward compared to what we have under the current system, where productive labour is essentially organized by unaccountable and undemocratic corporate oligarchies.

The invention thing is quite interesting, I think. Just as in an anarchist society you might get several economic systems, so today we actually have several economic models under capitalism as well. One which I am quite familiar with as a software engineer is the open-source model of software development. Last year I invented a new and pioneering method for installing Wordpress websites using a fairly obscure collection of deployment software. The mechanism I invented is so niche that even I struggle to develop the enthusiasm to explain its benefits even to people within the same field but I was excited enough to develop it that I spent three months of my free-time doing that, and now that it is done I am still pleased with the effort even though no one uses it. So basically I invented something and released it for free which was the very definition of a project for which I receive no thanks: no economic compensation, no fame within my professional circles, etc. And yet I was still happy to create and distribute it for free, even allowing others to modify it if they found it useful. So I think that when you are very invested in a particular problem field it's actually very easy to develop the enthusiasm to figure out an invention for a better way of doing something, even if you know you'll receive nothing for it but the personal satisfaction of having simplified a particular problem. And of course in an anarchist society you could expect that most techniques and methods are open-source, and able to be modified and improved upon for free by any interested party. Receiving fame among one's professional peer group, being invited to prestigious conferences within your field to talk about your invention, maybe even being interviewed by the news media--these are all extremely good motivations for creating something, arguably a lot stronger than money actually. (Considering most invention these days is IP-protected and ultimately owned by corporations, I'm kind of surprised the myth of the solo inventor made rich by his own success succeeds actually.) And this happens a lot in software. The most common operating system software globally across all devices? By far, Linux. Windows only leads in the desktop, and that only because of entrenched capitalist user lock-in paradigms.

A party that considers communism as part of it's core message isn't one I would be hesitant to call extreme. What that effectively means is that they consider the abolition of the market economy (or the travesty of a market economy that we currently have) to be the ultimate goal of the party. And for anyone who thinks an economic model other than one involving at least marginally free markets works, please consult your nearest primer on economics such as:
https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Our-Markets-Essential-Economics/dp/098442542X

Ideally we would have stayed Neutral during ww1 and mirrored our military like the Swiss's militia system. Iran is a problem because the CIA & British fooled around with Iran which blew up in their faces. We still feel the repercussions of their mess up yet the organizations who caused the mess in the first place say that things will be different this time.

https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=different+this+time+stock+market&qid=1567395501&s=gateway&sr=8-1

>If you don't understand calculation problem, marginal value, global capitalism, freedom, income mobility, regulations, innovations in the first place of course you'll end up as a commie. What did you expect?

Lmfao. I see somebody just finished Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt got me started, so I'll go with that one.

Great question!

First, technically a government doesn't go bankrupt. Bankruptcy only applies to inviduals and companies within a country.

Greece may well default on their loans, i.e. not pay or they could undergo a loan restructuring where the principal is reduced or the terms altered.

Currently many people believe that Greece cannot repay it's obligations at the current settings as growth is fundamentally too low. The Greek government remarkably has to continue borrowing just to keep going. If it stopped the consequences would be highly unpredictable. The country could, conceivable just crumble but it probably wouldn't. The EU/US/China would step in at some point. But the pain would be serious. Massive unemployment, large scale emigration.

The best scenario is that Greece gets their debt restructured, the banks take some haircut and the Greek government manages to get going with reasonable taxation in place and less tex evasion.

Sovereign default is not an uncommon occurence. Check out the marvelous book This Time is Different for a list of the many, many times countries have defaulted. As it happens, the leader in Europe for the most defaults is Greece.

I learned this from a talk by Peter Leeson on his book The Invisible Hook, I think this one.[1:02:47] The bits about pirate democracy begins ~10:30

The Book

Very apropos for talk like a pirate day, I suppose. :D

Well, I'm reading that book.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Let us not forget that US bankers were financing the bolshevik revolution in 1917 as well as Hitler's national socialist party a few years after that. This is well documented by the works of Anthony C. Sutton.

I think a better question is why did /r/economics significantly improve in quality.

To begin, libertarians are a very vocal, opinionated, stubborn group who thrive in fringe internet communities. Paleo-libertarians ("Austrian" school followers) in particular think that their ideology is not just an ideology but actually Very Serious Intellectual Economics, so of course they'd find /r/economics to be a natural fit for themselves. I mean think of how many libertarian writers conflate their politics with "basic economics." You don't usually see liberals or moderates pulling that.

A few things happened over time though:

• Moderators stepped up to improve the quality. /u/besttrousers in particular deserves a lot of credit.
  
  
• Reddit itself became a more mainstream site, and libertarianism isn't exactly mainstream. So an influx of mainstream thinkers crowded out libertarians.
  
  
• The Ron Paul 2004/2008 hysteria died, so libertarian "recruiting" (sorry if that's a loaded term) slowed down.
  
  
• This is just postulation on my folk, but I think among younger folk, libertarianism is starting to look crazier and crazier. I mean I'll just take climate change as an example. Many libertarians deny climate change (they call it "AGW"), which is becoming more and more irrefutable... and yet they're all science-touting atheists? Oh...kay. There's also straight-up no purely libertarian solution to climate change. None.

The hypocrisy is amazing. Britain, Germany, America certainly had no problems with stealing intellectual property [see below] or erecting huge barriers to trade [https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/]. In fact, they even invaded and drugged a nation to steal wealth [https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Opium-Wars-Jack-Beeching/dp/0156170949/].

 

IP theft is a century's long Western tradition

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-26/china-didn-t-invent-industrial-espionage

http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/0143118749

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/internet-privacy/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.html

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/26/a_nation_of_outlaws/?page=full

http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Program-Scientists/dp/0316221031/

http://japanfocus.org/-Christopher-Reed/2177/article.html

This is so fucking dumb just kill me. You can make reasonable arguments about how debt is bad and it how current policies are misguided, but don't be so fucking stupid to say to make vague references to some pre-assumed linearities in the hard sciences that often don't exist. Debt Does work differently at a national level and makes for some interesting dynamics, for a great empirical study on how different kinds of debt interact and how they have vastly different impacts, check out.

This Time It's different it shares the same probable end view as you anyways.

On to your weird physics appeal. Tons of things work differently on separate scales. Such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations

which has a macroscopic and microscopic sections. There's tons of examples of this.

edit: and don't for a second think I'm an "economist" I hardly have any respect for the current state the field is in, and do not share the same respect for the nobel prizes of economy(of which the bank of sweden awards and was not mentioned in the will of alfred nobel), as say I would for physics, chemistry, or medicine

> (https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986) If post length were the basis for winning an argument, you'd win. However, you have little idea what you are talking about due to your neoliberal blinders. Try reading the book at the link, which exactly supports the point I made.

Why is your only source a book that supports your prior beliefs? Why is it that a huge majority of economists support free trade, and you choose to disagree based on one book?

Maybe "you have little idea what you are talking about due to your neoliberal blinders" corporate shilling.

> if she thinks that the railroad tracks were laid across the country without eminent domain seizure BY the government, she's crazy...

Some railroads were, in fact, laid across the country without eminent domain seizure by the government. Including one transcontinental line - the Great Northern - which grew slowly and organically, building each segment to profitability before extending it further rather than racing to cover as much territory as possible as some of the more heavily subsidized lines in the south did. Curiously enough, when hard times came in the Panic of 1893, the Great Northern was one of the few railways that avoided bankruptcy. Rand is thought to have based Taggart Transcontinental in part on this bit of largely-forgotten economic history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_%28U.S.%29

I recommend a book called The Myth of the Robber Barons; it covers the strategies followed by large industrialists of the time, arguing that those who gained market share via market competition were largely pro-consumer and those that took subsidies to compete - including some of the railroads some of the time - weren't. (Atlas actually does a decent job of illustrating the point.)

I recommend The Box by Levinson

Hey eggshellmoudling! I'm at work so I can't pull up many references, but I'll see if I can help with some of your questions here.

First, the question of income inequality being a threat, and how it relates to redistribution. I definitely agree with your assessment of the last answer. It was more of a condonement of wealth redistribution than an explanation of the problem we (saying that as a libertarian, but I don't speak for all of us) have with calling income inequality a threat. In and of itself, wealth inequality is simply a consequence of how society is working. I think that a good argument could be made that inequality IS a threat in a system like we find ourselves in now, because money is so closely tied with power and rich people can use their money to influence the government and get richer. However, a small percentage of a population being incredibly rich isn't inherently bad. As long as they have come across their money in a fair (loaded word) way, as in without coercing or tricking people, they have given enough to society to merit having that amount of wealth. The only potential threat, which is a pretty minor one really, is that they don't spend their money responsibly. If, for example, they use their money to pay every person in the world to stop working, they would disrupt every market and people would starve to death. A more realistic example might be hoarding it in a place where it isn't effectively invested. If they are using the money to invest in other industries or employ people for tasks that add wealth to the system, which almost every rich person does, they aren't hurting anyone by simply being rich.
As far as redistribution goes, we believe that the current amount of inequality is heavily aided by things like redistribution of wealth and government regulations. For an example of that, say a really poor person finds out that they have a knack for orthodontics (not sure how they found that out :p) and that they could help a lot of people and make a ton of money practicing it. It wouldn't matter at all in today's system because they would be restricted by the barriers of entry to that field established by the government. Like I said before, you can argue that wealth inequality is bad right now, IMO, because the rich are so easily able to use their wealth to keep the poor poor through government coersion, which is unfair to the poor.


Second, how do we address the problem of a tiny minority controlling the wealth and allow people like you to thrive? I don't think you'll like my answer to this one, but please understand that I'm trying to be respectful and if anything comes off as rude or condescending I apologize. One way to think of wealth is as a big pool. Production adds wealth to the pool, and by adding to the pool people are allocated a certain portion of the pool. It might help to say this simple truth: there is only as much wealth in the world as is produced. That sounds simple but has huge implications. Mainly, it means that if everyone is doing the thing that they do most effectively, society as a whole benefits from a bigger pool. Now, back to your question. I have addressed the first part already, but when it comes to people that are trying hard but aren't getting a big enough portion of the pool, the fundamental reason (in a market society) is that they aren't contributing enough to earn a bigger portion. They are contributing less to the wealth of the world so they don't get as much wealth themselves. The ways to fix that are to either (1) grow the entire pool or (2) find a new way to gain more of the pool, thereby contributing to (1). That being said, I would be willing to bet that your situation is entirely different from that. For example, I highly doubt that you would feel maxed out on effort, talent, and luck if there weren't so many boundaries set up in society today.

I rambled a bit there but hopefully it was helpful. Let me know if you have questions about anything. If you are interested in why we (or at least I) believe that our system would be the best for every individual on average, I would highly recommend reading Economics In One Lesson or Capitalism and Freedom (this one is a little more difficult). They lay everything out very logically and had a huge impact on my belief system.

Check out Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson." It does a great job of offering counterpoints to false ideas people have and express in mainstream news outlets and on Reddit.

I think modern economics, at least in the US, is a bastardized system of what a free market should be and is instead, corporatism. In a pure free market, economic progress should look like a sine wave with peaks and troughs. Some good times and some bad times but with a slightly upward trend for growth.

The problem in the US is that politicians don't want there to be a trough during their term because it gets in the way of their only goal: to be re-elected. So, elected officials provide subsidies to certain industries to prop them up until the next election. Through these subsidies, government picks winners and losers instead of the free market.

Over time, leaders from government and leaders from corporations switch back and forth, through bigger campaign donations or bigger subsidies. This is why you see people from Goldman Sachs or Monsanto getting jobs with the Federal Reserve or Department of Agriculture, and vice versa.

To answer your question, enough time has gone by that the biggest players in the private industry are given government allowances that make it impossible for out-of-favor firms to compete.

Paul's policies break this up. If the Department of Education is gone, then local school districts may choose who supplies their school lunches, leaving the big supplier who has donated millions to the DOE officials without their guaranteed contract.

Also, reverting to the gold standard would be really tough for our economy due to it's size, though not impossible.

Hopefully there are others in this thread more knowledgable than myself who can chime in.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

Spoiler alert: It was never different.

> My means are rules that allow voluntary relationships with minimal violence.

There are two problems with this model:

• Voluntary: When there are extreme disparities in resources, calling relationships voluntary is questionable. Someone in poverty can "choose" to work for 10 cents per day, or "choose" to pay $1000/pill for life-saving medication. Where there is no leverage, there is no agency; where there is no agency, there is no will.
  
  
• Minimal violence: Existing capital and property relationships are maintained via the threat of force. Violence is not eliminated, and instead becomes a tool of the wealthy, applied selectively. (Poor Charlie Shrem sits in prison, while the big bankers faced no consequences.)
  
  That said, I'm not going to claim Chomsky's solutions are necessarily realistic. However, there is a wider spectrum of potential community and social systems than what we have become accustomed to, and it is this history from which Chomsky draws. I recommend David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years for exploring the history of money and its relationship to war, slavery and the state, and the multitude of primitive currency-less societal systems for managing responsibilities and resources (spoiler: it wasn't barter).
  
  While I have no illusions about the possibility or desirability of reverting to pre-industrial, small-scale social systems, I don't think we should be content with prioritzing the rights of capital as an end unto itself, and I am confident in our ability to create superior and more equitable post-state social structures.

Do you honestly believe that if a billionaire makes a dollar, that it somehow prevents you from making a dollar as well? Do you think that there is legitimately a finite amount of money in this world? Do you think that billionaires actually have a scrooge mcduck vault full of all their billions? Cause if you've answered yes to any of this I recommend you read this book :

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529

I'd recommend reading many sides/perspectives so that you can formulate an independent mind and not just be a mouthpiece of some economist's ideology. For instance, I disagree with a lot of Marx, but I think his materialist critique of history and his critique of capitalism are very useful and a lot of it is correct. His solutions/recommendations are shit, but that doesn't discount his contributions. My recommendations:

Generally Considered Right-Leaning Economics:

Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510274539&sr=8-1

F. A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom: https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510274634&sr=8-1

F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Conceit-Errors-Socialism-Collected/dp/0226320669/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1510274634&sr=8-3

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations: https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nations-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553585975/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510275227&sr=1-3

Frederic Bastiat, The Law: https://www.amazon.com/Law-Frederic-Bastiat/dp/1612930123/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=31TE91RXV0Q2XPPWE81K

Also read: Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig Von Mises

Generally Considered Left-Leaning Economics:

J. M. Keynes, The General Theory: https://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Employment-Interest-Money/dp/0156347113/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510274943&sr=1-3

Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: https://www.amazon.com/Accumulation-Capital-Rosa-Luxemburg/dp/1614277885/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510275041&sr=1-2

Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution: https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Writings-History-Political-Science/dp/0486447766/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510275041&sr=1-1

Also read: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Modern day Left/Keynesian economist is Paul Krugman.

Anarchism:

Emma Goldman: https://www.amazon.com/Anarchism-Other-Essays-Emma-Goldman/dp/1484116577/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510275717&sr=8-1

Bigbuddhabelly presents the Heinlein/republican position.

Let me point out a couple of problems with this point of view.

1. A GROUP of people can be full of many people that are uninformed and stupid and STILL (as a group) get the right answer most of the time (the Who Wants to be a Millionaire effect). In fact, there is a wealth of research that indicates that a large group of clueless people will generally outperform experts. For an accessible introduction to this, you can check out James Surowiecki's [Wisdom of Crowds] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds). Another [link] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706)
   
   
2. The mechanic analogy is ultimately a failure. In the case of the customer and the mechanic, the customer is the sole individual being serviced and the mechanic is the sole individual doing the servicing.
   
   Using your analogy, the politician provides the service and the voter is the customer. Note that in the case of democracy, the politician services ALL citizens: intelligent or not, voting or not. That is exactly the reason your analogy breaks down, democracy is very much not like getting your car fixed.
   
   
3. Clueless Joe may not be the brightest, but there is a chance he knows what will benefit him and will vote for the politician that will be an advocate for the Clueless Joes of the world. If you exclude all the Clueless Joes from voting, you just about guarantee that no politician will be an advocate for Clueless Joe. So in a democracy there is a chance that the government will look out for C.J., while in a Heinleinian meritocracy, Clueless Joe is guaranteed to be screwed.
   
   
4. empirical evidence weighs in against the claim that a democracy doesn't work. Look at the countries with the highest per capita income, the most advanced science, the most advanced health care, the most advanced education, the most freedoms, the lowest infant mortality, etc. You will note that in any list of such countries, at least 15 of the top 20 will always be democracies (or republics such as the US).
   
   Disclaimer: I am not related to James Surowiecki, I have never met him, I do not work for the publisher of The Wisdom of Crowds, and I have no financial interest in his book.
   
   edit: added disclaimer
   
   

>I do want strong public education and universal healthcare. However, I want those services to be provided with the most efficient use of tax dollars instead of that money being pissed away.

Yikes, Please read

If you have an interest in the topic, I'd encourage you to read Debt: The first 5000 years

Mr. Graeber argues that contemporary major religions: Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam were spiritual reactions to an increasingly material world -- which really didn't exist prior to the invention of money, and debt, debt peonage, and ultimately slavery. And indeed, into the middle ages, Christian thinkers were even questioning the godliness of private property itself.

Which is why "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" makes a lot more sense in the Lord's prayer.

Really fascinating book. He also debunks the idea of a barter economy you mentioned up thread.

Your response is very silly. The answer to OP's question is far simpler - no need to call anybody racist - and has to do with economics. Chapter 23 of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson explains that the purpose of inflation is to cancel out minimum wage laws. Devalue the currency and suddenly businesses can afford to pay $15/hour to flip burgers. But inflation is worse than that; it necessarily involves a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich (since the wealthiest folks are those closest to the newly minted money). This is very useful to people in power because the effects are largely indirect and invisible.

The Nixon Shock of 1971 removed the exchangability of US dollars and gold, instituting a freely floating currency and unleashing the Federal Reserve's power to devalue the dollar with impunity. This has involved a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, sucking purchasing power out of the middle class and resulting in the current situation that OP is inquiring about.

This chart shows inequality over time and illustrates what happened since the 70's.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt.

(Free pdfs are also really easy to find.)

Longshoreman unions fighting automation is only a delaying action. In the late 60's / early 70's the San Francisco port longshoreman union blocked container ships so thoroughly that Oakland saw an opening and created a huge container port. Result: no more commercial shipping in SF.

A good book to read about this is The Box.

Every new pass of automation is reducing labor costs at ports - it can be delayed, but will eventually happen.

I really like 1491 and 1493. Anything that smashes this revisionist history thing we've got going in the US.

UW robbed me of my love for reading for fun.

A ~year after graduating, I was recommended Look Who's Back, which is a funny book about Hitler waking up in 2011, with no recollection on what happened.

It turned into a movie, and is a good/short read.

After that, I read:

• The metamorphosis (Kafka)
  
• Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
  
• Debt, the first 5000 Years (Graeber)
  
• Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Murakami)
  
• ...and a bunch of others
  
  I forgot how much I like spending an afternoon sipping coffee and reading a great book.

Someone who hasn't even read the first few pages of Hazlitt's book, I presume.

Modeling incentives lies at the heart of almost all of modern economics. Not just game theory - even modern macroeconomics is really about modeling how agents respond to things.

If you are looking for pleasure reading, I wouldn't suggest macroeconomics.

Personally, I liked texts that examine interesting institutions or behaviors through the lens of incentives. Here are a few suggestions:

1. evolution of legal systems and the incentives they produce. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/legal_systems_very_different_12/LegalSystemsDraft.html
   
   
2. economics of piracy.
   https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095
   
   
3. almost anything by Becker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker

The question is difficult to answer because one reads about impending collapse for a great many reasons, and why the economy doesn't actually collapse (or, rarely, it does) depends on what thing people are worried about and whether it really is a problem. There's no dogmatic answer to the question that I can think of. Sometimes it's right to worry about collapes (e.g. when we were at the high point of the financial crisis), usually it's not because the problems are over-stated.

You should read Reinart and Rogoff's This Time is Different if you're interested in this topic. They show that financial crises are a part of every market economy ever to exist, and they have strikingly similar properties across time and space despite the experts tendency to claim they're different from the past. That's reassuring in the sense that most nations--though not all--survive a great many crises and avoid complete collapse over the years, which is what you asked about. It's not so reassuring in trying to figure out how to actually prevent or moderate the crises.

I can think of a few

• Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" - WHY and how whole empires fall
  
  
• Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" - How money rules the world - here's how.
  
  
• Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" - his thesis might not be entirely correct - but it's a VERY fair look at how our history was influenced by these factors.
  
  
• Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's - "The Predictioneer's Game" - - How quantitative models are SCARILY accurate
  
  
• Emanuel Derman's "Models Behaving Badly" - And how sometimes quantitative models are totally wrong.
  
  
• Paul Roberts - "The End of Oil" - Probably the most serious and balanced read on what could be one of the most important economic problems facing our modern civilization in the next 20 years.
  
  
• Frank & Cook's "Winner Take All Society" - and why things are a problem.
  
  
• Richard Florida's "The Great Reset" - Florida is a pretty good author all around - far better than some others in the pitch.
  
  
• James Bamford's amazing "Body of Secrets" - Not all our enemies are external, and sometimes our allies turn out to actually be thuggish & deadly enemies.
  
  
• Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" - Nobody here is exactly as they appear.
  
  
• Carl Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World"
  
  
• Robin Marantz Henig's "A Monk in the Garden" - Yeah - the priest that proved Darwin's theory, in 1865.....oh yeah and he invented statistics along the way.
  
  
• Brian Sykes' "The seven Daughters of Eve"
  
  
• Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" - Every page is practically amazing - a collection of amazing old articles from Dr. H's work
  
  
• Kristina Borjesson's edit of "Into the Buzzsaw" - the hard truth about a couple of things in the US media
  
  
• Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" - a great work about such an amazing idea.
  
  
• Kim Sterelny's "Dawkins vs. Gould" - this is a REAL debate about evolution!
  

Economics In One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt is the primer that was recommended to me when I started (slowly) reading about economics. No doubt at greater levels of complexity his thesis starts to fray a bit, but the book is a clear introduction to the fundamentals.

I haven't read any of his books but I have read many of his op-eds in NYT and my guilty pleasure is watching economics documentaries because they make me angry, Inequality for All is one of my favorite examples of nonsense. Generally he falls in the same trap as non-economist commentators from both sides in that he misunderstands & misrepresents economics, hold very strange views with regards to economic history and generally has a pretty significant Dunning–Kruger on the subject (or all the fields this seems to occur most frequently with economics, some of the ideas are sufficiently accessible and some pieces of data can seem meaningful when they are not) .

A short list of some significant issues I have had with him in the past;

• He asserts that the great depression was caused by falling labor share (higher profits & lower wages) which is simply wrong, consensus almost entirely supports that which Friedman posited in Monetary History of the US; a speculative bubble cause a financial recession and tightening of monetary policy after the crash caused the depression. Also labor share actually rose significantly through the 20's.
  
• He also asserts that recessions in general are caused by falling labor share, he shows a cyclic correlative effect for profits as proof of this (ignoring that its expected that profits would by cyclic) entirely ignoring that the last three (possibly five) recessions occurred during a period where labor share has been virtually unchanged. For the record the only cause of recessions is shocks, there is no magic reason why they occur or mechanism that would allow us to prevent them; we smooth the cycle with monetary policy but that's the extent of our control.
  
• He uses that absurd graph showing absolute corporate profits vs hourly wages which EPI originated constantly, ignoring that its entirely excluding salaried workers, it comparing real & nominal figures and that it uses self-reported income instead of payroll (under reporting bias). There has been no divergence between productivity and income.
  
• Bizarrely he seems to have a high-school level of understanding of labor economics, he doesn't understand the mechanism by which wages are set nor the mechanisms by which they rise. Similarly he also makes some pretty absurd remarks regarding the economic effects of increasing labor share (such as forcing businesses to raise wages during a recession). Similar problems with how he regards unionization as a silver bullet for an assorted list of ailments.
  
• He doesn't understand the significance of credit markets in cycle management, he outright claims that the ability of businesses to access credit during recessionary periods has no effect on the severity of recessions. Many economists, myself included, would assert that monetary policy is our most important tool for managing recessions, a smaller number (also including me) would assert that its the only effective tool in advanced economies. There is a huge open question regarding the efficacy of fiscal stimulus in advanced economies, its also notable that the number of economists who believe congress could design a reasonable stimulus plan is nearly half of those who believe fiscal stimulus is useful.
  
• Many of his ideas are sound when simply stated in short form but go loopy in the details. Increasing EITC would be a very good thing indeed, removing the taper not so much. Universal healthcare would be a very good thing indeed, single-payer insurance not so much. The problem with education is efficacy not resources. etc

This is a great intro to the history of shipping containers. It was one of those topics that I thought would be really boring but its completely fascinating. Since reading the book I now look at every object and think about how it probably came in a shipping container from the other side of the world. https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408

Nicky Case of Evolution of Trust has another explorable, this time on Crowds.

I found the sandbox element less fun and insight-inducing in Crowds, but it feels like there is a lot of potential here. I would be interested in adding a kind of RTS element, where the nodes output resources based on contagious traits. Even the ability to play with thresholds and tie strength would be nice.

> A quick response to James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds
First off, I'm not dissing this book. It's a good book, and Surowiecki was trying to tackle the same question I am: “why do some crowds turn to madness, or wisdom?”

> Surowiecki's answer: crowds make good decisions when everybody is as independent as possible. He gives the story of a county fair, where the townsfolk were invited to guess the weight of an ox. Surprisingly, the average of all their guesses was better than any one guess. But, here's the rub: the people have to guess independently of each other. Otherwise, they'd be influenced by earlier incorrect guesses, and the average answer would be highly skewed.

> But... I don't think "make everyone as independent as possible" is the full answer. Even geniuses, who we mischaracterize as the most independent thinkers, are deeply influenced by others. As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.”

> So, which idea is correct? Does wisdom come from thinking for yourself, or thinking with others? The answer is: "yes".

> So that's what I'll try to explain in this explorable explanation: how to get that sweet spot between independence and interdependence — that is, how to get a wise crowd.

Slide 3c paints Case as prosocial consequentialist: sever friendships to encourage self-sacrifice.

> What we have now is capitalism

No, it is not. Capitalism is a system of private property facilitated by voluntary exchange free from force, fraud, and coercion... I want your apple more than my dollar. You want my dollar more than your apple. We both win in this mutually beneficial exchange. Neither of us is beholden to the other. I am not forced to buy your apple and you are not forced to sell it to me.

When government comes in and demands tribute in the form of taxation where I have to pay more than your asking price or forces you to only sell certain apples the interaction is no longer free...

A relationship with any business is always voluntary. I am not forced to buy from or work for any business. I voluntarily choose to do so because I benefit. This is not the case with government which uses force and threats of force to make people conform to its will.

The US hasn't had a free market in 150 years(or arguably ever). Capital, trade, and industry are all now being controlled and subsidized by government... regulated markets arent free... this corporatist/socialist/fascist amalgamation we are now faced with is not capitalism...

> I would like to see some serious academics state otherwise.

Well, that obviously depends on their leanings. I know plenty of "academics" that concur with my position however. But it is no secret that most academics are leftists/socialists... this is precisely why there is such a misunderstanding on this topic... as this is what most are fed their entire education... that big bad capitalism is evil, and white knight government had to come in an save everybody from the market... and if it wasnt for government children would be working in mines and wed all have exploding toasters etc. etc. etc....

> As for the anti-establishment angle, I think socialism is pretty much that.

This is one of the biggest fallacies about political theory. That socialism is somehow a poor workers movement meant to stand up to the big bad capitalists. This is total rubbish. Historically, the financial elite have supported socialism whole cloth. These people are corporatists NOT capitalists. I would suggest Professor Anthony Suttons book "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Socialism and its predecessor Mercantilism have always been the preferred apparatus of control for the financial masters. It is the free-market that creates the most wealth for all that must be demonized and suppressed because it creates a powerful middle class that challenges the status quo.

This is why to start a small business now literally costs 10s of thousands of dollars to comply with all the regulations, licenses, forced insurances, etc. Do you honestly believe they are just doing this to protect consumers? Yes, only someone that can afford a million dollar taxi medallion can drive a taxi because our wise overlords are just looking out for the public good....

> Government power is not that great in the face of global capitalism, I think you have all seen how easily individuals and companies have run rings around national governments, especially in terms of taxes and bailouts. The power in today's world lies in the hands of the ultra wealthy, which has been regaining strength since the post-war period.

This is EXACTLY why it is a horrible idea to have a powerful(or any IMO) government. It will always be wielded by the powerful to suppress and oppress. Corporations have nothing to do with the free market OR capitalism. Corporations are created by the state endowed with special government privileges (ie limited liability, tax and regulation exemptions, subsidies, grants, etc.) It is through the state apparatus that these companies/people gain a deferential advantage... In a free market all a business can do is offer you a product or service. Only those that are best geared towards serving the public interest rise to the top....

Mais um capitulo da série de coisas que achei para ouvir durante a natação:

Perambulando pelo /r/lectures achei esse thread sobre o video : 23 Things they don't tell you about capitalism, do coreano Ha-Joon Chang, que supostamente foi aluno do Joseph Stiglitz.

No thread tem um link com referencias dos livros dele e teve um que achei particularmente interessante: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Dei uma fuçada e achei o livro em formato de audio no youtube. Já ouvi o prefácio e achei interessante. O autor desmitifica muita coisa que é dita sobre o desenvolvimento da Coreia ao longo dos anos e o mito da Coreia ter sido um dos bastiões do mercado livre.

Como o livro é um pouco longo baixei no meu celular para ouvir enquanto dirijo/ ando de bicicleta também.

Para quem se interessar baixar eu sugiro essa ferramenta (Win/Linux/OSX), que é uma GUI para o youtube-dl

Not quite my friend, as David Graeber reveals in his study, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, for the most part debt/credit create these incredibly high gaps only when there is an institutional attempt to artificially create wealth by the elite, for the sake of the wealth creation. In our modern times, it would be called speculation. In the past, it was fucking with the relationship between currency and precious metals.

>I would say that predicting an exponential trend will continue "forever" is usually not a good bet.

There is an excellent book that all investors should read on exactly this idea. The title explains it all:

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

They cover dozens of investment bubbles from all over the world and over the centuries.

There's actually a very interesting book titled The Not So Wild, Wild West that discusses this very topic. The Native Americans developed property rights for resources that were scarce. Fishing equipment, for example, was generally owned by a single person. Before the introduction of horses the Native Americans didn't divide hunting land because it wasn't feasible for them to destroy entire herds of buffalo. After the introduction of horses their hunting strategies changed and their ability to wipe out entire herds was realized. Tribes began marking out hunting territories using rocks with pained icons on them and defended the marked territories against other tribes.

In general property rights are nonexistent for super abundant resources. It isn't worth the time and effort to defend something that can be easily obtained anywhere. Property rights generally come in when a resource is scarce, at what point it is worthwhile to defend any claims to that resource.

It's a world class city / rich Chinese are moving here / 100k immigrants per year / the greenbelt

AKA: "It's different this time"

And with the glut of pop-econ books on the market lately, now has never been a better time to start studying.

I recently met Peter Leeson at a talk about his book The Invisible Hook:The Hidden Economics of Pirates who gives a fascinating(and accessible) study of what piracy actually was and the incentives behind it(for example they weren't racist, they were remarkably democratic, and there was a reason they fostered that rough and tumble reputation).

If that isn't your cup of tea there is also The Not So Wild Wild West(whose authors I've also met) about how the Wild West reimagined on the silver screen is hardly more than just imagination(during a 50 year period associated with the "Wild West" you could count the number of bank robberies on your fingers[no toes]).

If you are looking for something a little more general you can pick up any number of History of Economic Thought books. My personal favorites are The Worldly Philosophers and Teachings of the Worldly Philosophers. The former of which gives an overview of the works of economists from Smith to Keynes(you'll have to pick up another book for history after 1950) with quotations from the original works. The latter switches the ratios of summary and quotations(its practically an anthology of greatest hits of economists with brief introductions).

I didn't get to meet Heilbroner, but he has spoken at the same economics club I met the others through(though long before my time).

If you're new to econ, I would suggest either Basic Economics, as /u/snatchinyosigns suggested, or "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.

http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=economics+in+one+lesson&qid=1555251994&s=gateway&sr=8-1

From there, you might want to get into some of the morality-focused books, if you want a short/easy one, I suggest "Anatomy of the State" by Murray Rothbard

https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state

If you want to learn about how an anarcho-capitalist society could work, I'd read Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman

http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=machinery+of+freedom&qid=1555252140&s=gateway&sr=8-1

That quote sounds good but is blatantly wrong. "People" are actually much smarter than individuals. For example, no single person put a man on the moon. No single person wrote the Linux kernel. Etc.

A good primer on the subject of economics by Sowell is Basic Economics.

I have found a great deal of use out of Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

A young person has spent his entire life having his needs provided for by his parents. So the only model he really knows is one where a benevolent authority figure takes care of people in need. Naturally he supports a strong welfare state.

As he grows older and becomes responsible for himself, he begins to understand that making good choices and working hard helps him do better in life, and helps him best provide for his family. So when the authorities take more and more of his earnings and give it to other people who he thinks are making bad choices and working less hard, he gets resentful. He wants the government to get stop interfering in his life. [Here I'm using a more classical understanding of conservatism, not the currently popular xenophobic, warfare-oriented understanding of conservatism.]

Also, in rare cases, as he gets older he'll learn enough economics to understand why welfare programs do more harm than good, and will advocate against them.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

I recommend you start with Hazlitt's book.

Try to avoid the capitalism vs socialism dichotomy, that is not going to be majorly helpful.

The most obvious is that taxes that is reducing the incentive to make a profit, but there are a myriad of other reasons that reduce the incentive that the book elaborates on.

There are interesting theories about the beginnings of money where it wasn't really adopted until it was used as the sole way of paying tax before that everything was based on credit/debit. A state would pay its soldiers in 'x' currency but also would require their taxes to be in 'x', that drove adoption.

​

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

I can't recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years enough.

To understand money you need to first understand debt.

Read "Debt: The First 5000 Years"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1612191290?pc_redir=1409142733&robot_redir=1

A government agency isn't a part of the free market. The hypothetical free market solution would be having multiple completing licensing agencies (like you have with some goods like plastics/oils) that other companies require to work with them (at the community level or otherwise) and if any of them were to openly violate trust they would be thrown out and one of the other companies would be preferred. Would require very different infrastructure but that's not surprising as you'd have to be a bit confused to call the current system a free market.

It's also not mythical it's a pretty clearly explained and defined thing. Here is a good intro book.

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/what-is-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/


https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-biggest-economic-social-political-issue-two-economies-ray-dalio

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm

Sometimes technology and trade is intertwined. For a subset of the story a book I liked is “The Box”. Container shipping (new tech) was fought against by unionized dock workers. They later compromised by the shipping companies setting aside some cost savings for a pension.
Container shipping lowered the cost of shipping such that massive global trade became possible.

https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408

If US can be automated. So can China. So really it’s all intertwined.

Two more questions. When we switched from a agrarian society to industrial society. Was it peaceful? Why do we have Labor Day?

Last question, why is Trump in office?

I made the same mistake but the comment actually suggests A Farewall to ALms, a "sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention."

... Which sounds exactly as relevant as Hemingway. I doubt Clark argues that poor countries should kill their homeless in order to develop.

> Ako citate, koji zanr vam je omiljeni?

Non-fiction i naučna fantastika.

> Koji vam je omiljeni pisac,

Bill Bryson

Pa onda tu negde dalje u top10 je Andrić, Efraim Kišon, Asimov, Klark, Orvel.. ono, standardna lista dobrih pisaca, ne hipsterišem s knjigama, ovi ljudi su velikani i to sa dobrim razlogom)

> omiljena knjiga?

Madrfaking Hari Poter serijal. Bez zajebancije. Od svega što sam pročitao u životu, a dosta sam pročitao i dalje se ložim na ceo Hari Poter univerzum.

> Kako nabavljate knjige? Da li ih kupujete, skidate sa interneta, uzimate iz biblioteke ili nesto cetvrto?

Sve ih skidam s neta, na engleskom uglavnom. Imam Kindle pa mi stvarno odgovara na ovaj način. Ponekad nabavim u papirnom izdanju.

---

Trenutno čitam: The Invisible Hook (The Hidden Economics of Pirates) - Peter Leeson

Ekonomista napisao knjigu o piratima.

Jebote, ljudi su ladno u 17veku imali funkcionalnu demokratiju na palubama svojih brodova negde u pizdi materini na okeanu, mnogo pre nego što su je imale i uopšte "izmislile" države sa svojom problematičnom monarhijom. I to ne onu zastarelu Atinsku demokratiju iz antičke Grčke, već pravu koju je imalo svakog smisla uvoditi i imati. I sve to provučeno kroz ekonomiju. Skroz zanimljivo i zabavno štivo.

Ovaj komentar me navukao, a ja se čak uopšte i ne ložim na pirate. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wdd0n/im_a_typical_sailor_in_the_caribbean_around_the/cf116kk

A better financial history type book is the Reinhart & Rogoff one.

As long as you are building a list, let me share my to-read list after I finish reading my current book:

• The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King
  
• Exorbitant Privilege by Barry Eichengreen
  
• An Uncertain Glory: India and its contradictions by Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze
  
• Success and Luck by Robert Frank
  
• Economics Rules by Dani Rodirik
  
• The Midas Paradox by Scott Sumner
  
• Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries by Jagdish Bhagwati
  
• Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic
  
• After the Music Stopped by Alan Blinder
  
  You should also read Piketty's book and Bernanke's book but I didn't list them since I have read them and assume you have read them too.
  
  I tend to only read and alternate between history and econ books for my pop/non-academic reading. I've only listed the pop-econ books since I assume that's what you are after.
  
  Has anyone else read any of the books on my list? Are some terrible? If so let me know so I can avoid them.

It's not too hard to identify a debt-fueled asset bubble, which is what we have. The book This Time is Different does a good job of describing asset bubbles, where they come from and how they function.

Basically house prices are rising faster than wages are. The money has to come from somewhere so it's coming from increasing debt. Eventually servicing the debt will become impossible, some catalyst will occur, and house prices will revert to what the rent they can bring in justifies.

You could prove it's not a bubble by pointing to something like a commensurate rise in wages (which hasn't occurred), a population and demand explosion (which isn't occurring) or anything else that would justify the rise in prices beyond "they've been rising so they'll continue to rise so get in quick" group mentality.

As the title of the book sarcastically suggests, there isn't anything particularly novel about what's going on here. At some point interest rates will rise, or China or America will have a recession, or a newspaper scare campaign will happen, and then we'll revert. Predicting when that happens is tricky and could make you rich, but predicting that it will happen isn't and wont.

Classical Liberalism is a founding principle of our nation. In American politics it goes back to Jefferson and Madison, and then Lincoln with the founding of the Republican Party. "Conservative" and "Right Wing" in the US is very different from everywhere else because the founding principles we are trying to preserve are classically liberal. Between the Civil War and Great Depression we had the great industrial revolution which was fueled by Republicans dominating national politics and enabling the great engine of capitalism to transform America and the world. Of course Leftists had their part in balancing the ill effects of that era, but there was nothing liberal about them. Many of their leaders were socialists and communists. Most conservatives will credit Woodrow Wilson as being one of the worst people responsible for the massive expansion of state power and erosion of individual liberty.

Leftist liberals like some freedoms but not all. Such as workers deserve many freedoms, even if they come at the expense or detriment of their employers' freedoms. True classically liberal Republicans will argue that both parties have freedoms and will be reluctant to interfere.

Somewhere in the last century the left stole the word "Liberal" from those who care about liberty. It's just like every lie they've propagated on the American people.

If you want your mind blown by just how much our education system and teaching of history has been shaped by the Left, check out The Myth of the Robber Barrons. It's a short book but it will have you questioning everything your high school history teachers taught you about the post civil war boom. You'll see some of the worst examples of crony capitalism and state collusion with names you may have revered, and stories of entrepreneurs struggling against the state.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493003036&sr=8-1&keywords=The+myth+of+the+robber+barons

Lots of broad questions there. :-)

> where are we at in this cycle in the church? In the world in general?

I don't know, but one way that that church and world are different today than scriptural accounts where the pride cycle is enumerated is that scriptural accounts were generally about a single homogenous culture. Yes each culture was framed within its interactions with the surrounding cultures, but the narrative is focused mostly on the culture giving the account.

What about today? Yes, Mormonism has it's own cultures but what's different is that the doctrines and covenants in Mormonism are implemented world-wide across many different languages, nations, politics, and cultures. So it's very hard to point at the church as a whole and make a single judgement. To make any kind of judgement, you have to focus in on a particular homogenous group.

As for how to make the determination, the best approach that I've seen is this essay by Hugh Nibley:

Nibley - Book of Mormon and Prophecies of the end of the world

Here's an excerpt that explains his thesis:

> The righteous are whoever are repenting, and the wicked whoever are not repenting. "Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee" who gave thanks to God that he was not a crook or a lecher, that he fasted twice a week, paid a full tithe, and was very strict in his religious observances. All this was perfectly true. The other man was a tax collector and rather ashamed of some of the things he had done, and instead of thanking God by way of boasting, he only asked God to be merciful to him, a sinner (see [Luke 18:10–13]). The surprise is that the sinner was the righteous one—because he was repenting; the other one who "exalteth himself shall be abased"—because he was not repenting ([Luke 18:14]). None but the truly penitent are saved, and that is who the righteous are (see [Alma 42:22–24]).

He goes through the Book of Mormon and shows example after example after example of how the loss of the practice of repentance is what triggers the downward slope of the cycle. But he also points out that the message of the gospel is that the pride cycle isn't inevitable -- it's conditional on whether or not the people repent (see 4 Nephi).

So for the church as a whole, I'd say that as long as the doctrine and covenant power of repentance in Christ is taught as an important principle and as long as Mormons are willing to listen to and apply it, then there will be some who avoid the downward slope of the cycle. To the extent that others do not apply repentance and the Atonement of Christ, they will cycle through pride.

Now for your other question:

> Are we any worse now than 50 years ago?

Of course the answer is "it depends" on how you define "worse". Dr. Marc Siegel, in his book "False Alarm: The truth About the Epidemic of Fear", points out how the modern fear mongering culture simply doesn't represent reality:

> Statistically, the industrialized world has never been safer. Many of us are living longer and more uneventfully. Nevertheless, we live in worst-case fear scenarios. Over the past century we Americans have dramatically reduced our risk in virtually every area of life, resulting in life spans 60 percent longer in 2000 than in 1900. Antibiotics have reduced the likelihood of dying from infections... Public health measures dictate standards for drinkable water and breathable air. Our garbage is removed quickly. We live in temperature-controlled, disease controlled lives. An yet, we worry more than ever before. The natural dangers are no longer there. but the response mechanisms are still in place, and now they are turned on much of the time. We implode, turning our adaptive fear mechanism in to a maladaptive panicked response.

Bono, in a recent TED talk, highlights several statistics the are mind-blowingly positive (to use a technical term):

• More than 8 million people are on life-saving antiretroviral drugs, compared with only 200,000 a decade ago.
  
• In several African countries, malaria deaths have been cut by 75%.
  
• Child mortality rate for those under 5 is down by 2.65 million deaths a year since 2000.
  
• The percentage of people living in extreme poverty (< $1.25 a day adjusted for inflation) has declined from 43% in 1990 to 33% in 2000--then to 21% in 2010. The human race has halved poverty in one generation.
  
• 10 countries in Africa have, in the last decade, had 100% debt cancellation, a 3 times increase in aid, a ten-fold increase in foreign domestic investment, a 4-times increase in domestic resources, cut child mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and also halved extreme poverty.
  
  Matt Ridley, author of the book The Rational Optimist, helps put things in perspective:
  
  > ... the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want has been going rapidly upward for two hundred years and erratically upward for ten thousand years before that: years of life span, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of traveling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout. Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square-feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometers, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, and, of course, dollars than any that went before.
  
  What all of this data points towards is a story of unprecedented human progress despite the very real challenges we have faced and still face today. There certainly have been and will continue to be setbacks and bumps in the road. But the human story is a story of hope. And it is through the compassionate use of the gifts and talents God has blessed mankind that we will be able to overcome the physical challenges we face in this world.
  
  For "spiritual" definitions of "worse" I'd just point back to the first part of this comment and say that we're only worse off if we've let go of the covenant, repentant relationship with Christ. I'd say that no, IMO, that has not occurred significantly in the LDS church. It is very much a Christ-centered faith and one that espouses repentance rather than avoids it.
  
  Now whether the world as a whole is better of spiritually, that's debatable. My personal pet-peeve is seeing the total spiritual bankruptcy of those in my generation who have espoused post-modernism. Many have confused skepticism with cynicism. The problem I see with a pervasive cynicism is that it almost always leads to nihilism. It feeds off of itself in a kind of perpetual negativity. And the dangerous part is that many people think being cynical is the same thing as critical thinking.
  
  Critical thinking should lead you to hope or to an idea of what positive action you can take. It leads to things like honest questions, listening, understanding, decision making, faith, action, etc. It is an enabling process. Cynical thinking removes hope or leads to negativity. It leads to mocking, ignoring others, a focus on who is right rather than what is right, doubt, indecision, etc. Cynical thinking is a disabling process. Often people confuse the two since they both originate from independent thinking, but they lead you in opposite directions and views of the world.
  
  In a spiritual context, skepticism without cynicism will lead to introspection which leads to repentance. But unbridled cynicism won't lead to repentance because it undercuts hope and faith (which are prerequisites to repentance).
  
  But post-modernism is just one example. Nationalism, politics, faith in a church/religion, family pride, etc. All can fuel pride when hubris isn't checked. Repentance bridles and anchors the human condition. And the scriptures and history are full of examples of what happens when hubris is unchecked.

Certainly! The best resource I have found is Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist, which does a very good job presenting the argument that the problem is resource distribution, not raw population.

> In a small community - say a village of 350 people - I would say 'Yes, we are all in this together and our collective success or failure is intertwined with one another and we must all contribute to helping each other by specializing in different things which together allow the best functioning society.

This is one of the many arguments for federalism, its why services should be supplied by states and local communities, the states can act as laboratories and people can move in and out of areas they favor.

> Capitalism measures success by the amount of money we have

No, capitalism doesnt measure anything, it is simply the economic system that allows individuals to exchange their goods or services as they see fit.

Dont anthropomorphize an economic system. Capitalism allows for taco bell to sell taco's at 2 for 99 cents and a Jackson Pollock artwork for a few hundred million dollars, it doesnt measure success.

I measure my personal success different than you do, it has nothing to do with an economic system.

> is a very difficult one when we get into details and I am unresolved in where I stand on it (where is the line drawn? Cue a reference to 'death panels'...).

All the more reason why putting a bureaucrat who does not care about you or even know you exist in charge of your health is such a bad idea.

> I am of the belief that our entire nation is stronger when we are looking out for each other.

I agree, but having the government forcing people at the point of a gun erodes the voluntary individual responsibility we have with each other. Looking out for eachother doesnt mean forcing one group of people to pay for another.

It is certainly not society's job to fill in the gaps where you have failed. It is your job to pick yourself up.

If you are actually genuine with your questions and actually want to learn I strongly recommend reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529) I think it would help a lot with your understanding of economics.

>BTW.. in the history of the world it is mostly innovations that are putting people out of work. Not putting people TO work.

Might I suggest this book before you go lecturing about things you have no idea about?

Yes, let us abandon the use of automobiles in order to return to the glory days of the booming horse and buggy industry where it took about ten people at most to put together a vehicle..

Or why don't we stop using cell phones? I'm sure the laid off land-line techs will appreciate this, but what of the many thousands of app developers, accessory manufacturers, researchers, and wireless infrastructure engineers that exist as a result of this advancement?

My first thought was Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, but Basic Economics works just as well

If you're looking for something more concise (as an intro to economic thought), Economics in One Lesson is a go-to resource. (Also avail. for BTC. :D)

Detroit, like NYC, used to be a large shipping and manufacturing center. Containerization destroyed the shipping industry in those towns. The book The Box explains a lot about what shipping used to be like and how containerization dropped the price of sending goods by up to 98%.

Once shipping became so cheap, there was no longer reason to keep manufacturing in the cities, so the plants moved first to the hinterlands (think suburbs, but further), to other regions (such as textile production moving first from the northern cities, first to non-union southern states and finally overseas), then it became clear that moving the whole factory became a cheap option.

What is happening to Detroit has been happening all along to the rest of the industrialized north-central to north-east USA. This part of America has been called "The Rust Belt" for more than 3 decades. The mess with Detroit has finally gotten so bad that the rest of the country can no longer ignore what is going on.

Jane Jacobs explained why regions became cities, and why they decline like this.

The easy answer is "because that's where the Industrial Revolution happened".

But that's just pushing the question back a little bit. The next level is "Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England?".

This is a very well-researched topic, and there are a couple of competing theories. I'm going to summarize one strain of research, which I personallyu know the best and find the most compelling: Greg Clark's theory that English primogeniture laws in the medieval period caused discount rates in England to decrease due to an increase in self-control capacity.

Needless to say, this is a fairly controversial theory.

*

Let's go back a bit to Clark's 2003 paper The Great Escape: The Industrial Revolution in Theory and in History. It concludes:

> The Industrial Revolution remains one of histories great mysteries. We have seen in this
survey that the attempts by economists to model this transition have been largely unsuccessful.
The first approach emphasizing an exogenous switch in property rights stemming from political
changes, despite its continuing popularity, fails in terms of the timing of political changes, and
their observed effects on the incentives for innovation. The second approach, which looks for a
shift between equilibria again fails because there is little sign of any major changes in the
underlying parameters of the economy which would lead to changed behavior by individuals.

> The most promising class of models are those based on endogenous growth. The problem here is
to find some kind of “driver” that is changing over time that will induce changes in productivity
growth rates. Previously these models seemed to face insuperable difficulties in that they find it
very hard to model the kind of one time upward shift in productivity growth rates that the
Industrial Revolution seemed to involve. But as we gather more information on the empirics of
the Industrial Revolution and the years before the discontinuity in TFP growth rates seems less
than has been imagined, and the transition between the old world of zero productivity growth
rates and the new world of rapid productivity growth much more gradual. This bodes well for
endogenous growth models.

Note that endogenous growth models are a fairly recent addition to our toolbox - primarily coming out of Paul Romer's work in the early 1990s.

Clark proposed a mechanism for this endogenous growth in Survival of the Richest: The Malhtusian mechanism in Pre-Industrial England.

Abstract**

> Fundamental to the Malthusian model of pre-industrial society is the assumption
that higher income increased reproductive success. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic of this model, its empirical support is weak. We examine the link
between income and net fertility using data from wills on reproductive success,
social status and income for England 1585–1638. We find that for this society,
close to a Malthusian equilibrium, wealth robustly predicted reproductive succapable logic of this model, its empirical support is weak. We examine the link
between income and net fertility using data from wills on reproductive success,
social status and income for England 1585–1638. We find that for this society,
close to a Malthusian equilibrium, wealth robustly predicted reproductive success. The richest testators left twice as many children as the poorest. Consequently, in this static economy, social mobility was predominantly downwards.
The result extends back to at least 1250 in England.

In his book A Farewell to Alms, Clark shows posits the following model:

• English law in the late medieval period made it easier for families to pass down inherited wealth.
  
• Consequently, families with more wealth were able to support larger families.
  
• Families that had lower discount rates (read: higher levels of self control) were more able to accumulate wealth.
  
• Higher levels of wealth and lower discount rates increased total investment.
  
• Higher investment levels leads to the Industrial Revolution.
  
  The data Clark presents is, in my opinion, quite convincing, and I haven't seen an effective refutation.
  
  While I think the institutional explanation is dominant within economics, it's worth noting that there are some adherent to a geographic explanation, such as the one Diamond explains in "Guns, Germs and Steel". It posits that the main driver of the English IR was geographic - England has more coal, and Europeans were in general more resistant to disease, which allowed for European expansion.

Can I please point out to all that "source?" does not ask for "a book you once read that claimed this," but rather an academic paper or papers that back up the claim or a reasonably well-known, evidence-based website with references to peer-reviewed articles or books.

I do realize that this particular redditor asked for "source or additional reading material?" Most of the rest of us just want the evidence-based source, which has not been provided here. It is not reasonable to ask us to order and read a book from Amazon in order to accept your sourcing.

Referencing a book you once read and maybe remember or don't quite right is not referencing a "source" although I agree that it can be considered "reading material" the previous redditor asked about.

Many Africans (and therefore african-americans) are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia, which provides some protection against malaria (see This and this.) These sites show something very different than your claim that there is a "weaker strain" of malaria which is like chickenpox.

Thanks!

You were responsible for either appeasing, empowering or financing fascism and leninism.
And don't let other redditors be fooled, the Western powers threw even Western countries under the bus, like that one time British bankers did anything in their power to protect the noble independence of central bankers, applying their “gentlemanly” rules and so appeasing the Nazis one last time.

http://holocaustonline.org/bank-for-international-settlements-bis/
http://holocaustonline.org/bank-of-england/
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/how-six-months-before-the-second-world-war-britain-gave-hitler-9-million-in-gold-that-belonged-to-another-country
http://www.globalresearch.ca/profits-ber-alles-american-corporations-and-hitler/4607
//www.amazon.com/Who-Financed-Hitler-Funding-1919-1933/dp/0671760831
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Secret-Bankers-Neutrality-Holocaust/dp/080652121X?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFklTLNy8c
http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X

Downvote all you like, this doesn't erase the support and finance the fascists received from western bankers and governments until he proved to be a wild card.

Everything you learned is wrong and there are major empirical and logical flaws with what you've said here

https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-Dethroned/dp/1848139926

This is not negotiable. You'll have to start from first principles, in this case Marx's own commentary on supply and demand in volume 3 of capital.

Tell them to.

SHUT Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism | http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/

THE Confessions of an Economic Hit Man | http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/

FUCK http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Hope-C-I-Interventions-II--Updated/dp/1567512526/

UP http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-State-Guide-Worlds-Superpower/dp/1567513743/

You might be really interested in this book. It covers a lot on this topic.

This book discuss how it worked out for Pirates.

Books on Pirates:

The Invisible Hook.

Villains of All Nations

The Buccaneers of America

Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates

The Sea Rovers Practice

The Buccaneers Realm

Empire of Blue Water

http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

> The financial crisis made the economy more vulnerable to other negative shocks.

Not entirely sure what you mean by that

> Trend growth may have been slowing down before the crisis

This is 100% true

> Financial crises lead to big drops in labour productivity that take a long time to reverse.

Not really? But financial crises have historically led to slower recoveries than other types of recessions (see This Time is Different by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff).

One more factor that I would add is the severity of the recession. Normally we fight recessions through monetary policy; the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates to decrease borrowing costs and stimulate the economy. But this recession was large enough that interest rates hit zero and couldn't go any lower, so monetary policy ran out of ammo. You could fix that by augmenting it with fiscal policy (i.e. government deficits), but instead, after a short burst of deficit spending in 2009, the US and Europe turned to deficit-cutting fiscal austerity.

> I'm also a bit clueless as to how you would incorporate trade theory into this example

You wouldn't. The GFC and its anemic recovery had basically nothing to do with international trade. Trade theory impacts long run supply/productivity issues and income/wealth distribution, but not the business cycle (except VERY indirectly).

That's an awesome list. I'd echo that the two very best sources to learn about the exact crimes committed leading up to the financial crisis are The Untouchables and
Inside Job.

And I'd add a third:
Predator Nation (written by the guy who made Inside Job)

If people just want a single source, The Untouchables is where they should go. It shows how banks sold products they knew were defective. That is fraud, and it is criminal. Simple as that. The executives were knowingly selling those products (and there were many) should be in jail.

Here's a fuller list of selections I can recommend from a reading list at TooBigHasFailed.org. Any of these sources are good for learning what was going on leading up to the crash.

Podcasts

NPR: The Giant Pool of Money |
NPR: Return to the Giant Pool of Money |
NPR: Another Frightening Show about the Economy |
EconTalk interview w/ Simon Johnson

Documentaries

Addendum to Inside Job |
PBS: Money, Power, & Wall Street |
Aljazeera: Meltdown |
60 Minutes: The Speed Traders |
Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street

Books

I.O.U. - John Lanchester |
Griftopia - Matt Taibbi |
Infectious Greed - Frank Partnoy |
All the Devils are Here - Joe Nocera & Bethany McLean |
Traders, Guns, and Money - Satyajit Das |
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report

ETA: I see that a moderator here is requesting academic sources. Here are three good ones: Fault Lines - Raghuram Rajan | Republic, Lost - Lawrence Lessig | This Time Is Different - Reinhart & Rogoff

To be honest, most of the academic sources I've read don't focus on criminality on Wall Street. I'd love to find more that do, though.

I think most modern anarchist thought regarding non-state security production does not formally rely on vigilantism (although this is a component).

Instead, there is a concentration on risk management via insurance and co-insurance. When you are robbed, there are two components:

1. Psychological
   
2. Fiduciary
   
   No one can make you whole on #1. No state, certainly.
   
   

   2 is a different story entirely. If someone steals your money or jacket, are you satisfied with only receiving your money and jacket, or equivalents? The insurance market is constructed to replace you, to indemnify you against loss. The concept from here is that competing insurers and co-insurers then make decisions regarding how much they will indemnify via cash, and how much via other loss-prevention mechanisms. These mechanisms may include private security, mobile panic buttons, neighborhood watch programs (join a program, get a discount on your premium), or any other of a number of solutions.
   

   
   Because we know that a private insurer has to remain profitable while satisfying customers, we know that the production and types of security provided will be appropriate to the market. That is, you will get the right kind of security at the right price. You won't get 10 cops in a town of 200 (mainly issuing traffic citations), while there are 100 for a town of 100,000 down the street (dealing with robberies).
   
   Additionally, you won't pay security companies to take unnecessary risks, since the security companies are liable for their employees. You won't see SWAT-style raids of weed dealers, or officers hanging around on highways looking to generate revenue. Only a state would offer services this inefficient.
   
   Really, there are whole books on this subject, including historical analysis such as the "Not So Wild West" (http://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543)
   
   A synopsis of the former here: http://mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_2.pdf

>Look at the homicide rates in the old west of America, where there was little to no government intervention.

About that, the rate of murders in western towns was quite low according to records. For instance, the real town of Deadwood had fewer recorded murders in it's whole history than what they depicted in the first episode of the HBO show. Further reading I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

Standard Oil was still in steep competition with the major Russian oil producer at the time. The oil wasn't as well refined, but it was dirt cheap. They don't teach that in school. Think I read that in Burt Folsom's Myth of the Robber Barons.

I'm not conflating the two, I'm expressly contrasting them. I know there was a long time between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution... the Malthusian misery that I mentioned occurred precisely in that interlude. Of course that period included societies existing peacefully -- peacefulness is consistent with Malthusian misery, and in fact more conducive to it because spikes in the death rate are (together with drops in the birth rate) one of precisely two things that periodically pulled societies out of the Malthusian depths prior to the industrial revolution.

Clark's A Farewell to Alms covers these topics in depth.

The only argument I can make is that much of this has happened before and the world did not end:

http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691142165/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I21KKPZ8CTFWQO&colid=2PAC5SGHKXR27

Not exactly what you're asking for, I don't think, but The Invisible Hook is a fascinating non-fiction book about various aspects of pirate politics and economics.

Pirates

The Not So Wild West

Book recommendation

Just keep in mind, bubbles are not permanent. Corrections in the financial world are like forest fires. They clear out harmful debris and foster future growth. For you hodlers, if you're in this for the long haul, here's some things to keep in mind:

• Bitcoin took 3 years to recover from it's first correction
  
• The Canadian Banks (they didn't hold toxic assets during the housing crisis) took almost two years to recover from the housing implosion - and they were the good ones!
  
• Apple actually missed out on the tech boom entirely; they were thought of as a company on its last legs until the iMac was released then the iPOD.
  
• Actvision - a company that had nothing to do with the housing bubble, took six years to recover it's share price from 2008 levels.
  
• Microsoft took SIXTEEN YEARS to recover it's pre tech implosion price level. And it's never fully regained it's market cap.
  
  The thing about revolutionary new paradigms is that they don't do it without bumps in the road.

Havent read the book, but heard it is a good resource:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Not-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

https://mises.org/daily/4108

http://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

This book talk about the wild west.

How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas DiLorenzo is a fast read that covers all of this well. The Myth of The Robber Barons by Burton Folsom is more in-depth.

There's an ok-ish textbook, Energy and the Wealth of Nations by Hall and Klitgard in BioPhysical Economics that's a good starting point.

Robert Ayres also has a thermodynamical based approach that is very consistent with what you probably know from ecology. The Economic Growth Engine is also a pretty good general introduction to economic concepts that are thermodynamically correct.

Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is a good general critique of current neoclassical thinking from a scientific standpoint. It's sometimes good to read an insider's critique of the paradigm so you know what is problematic.

Doyne Farmer does more complexity stuff but he's involved in a similar space.

Elenor Ostrum is also another great place to start. Her work on sustainability and common pool resources is hugely important in the area.

There is also a huge amount of work being done in complexity economics using ecological models that I've only just started scratching the surface of.

There is a huge amount of work being generated in this area. Sadly very little of it is getting through to the economists.

Progress of the past few centuries has been an overwhelmingly positive force for improvement in the lives of most humans. The downsides are small by comparison.

Does anyone really yearn to return to a world without electricity, modern medicine, transportation, communication, and most important: Reddit?

I recommend The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves for a nice debunking of nostalgia for the good ol' days before all this progress.

Thanks! I'll check these out... and maybe I'll reread the Dark Tower series, so friggin' great.

<>

Edit:

Amazon links:

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley


Abundance Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler


Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Stephen King's Dark Tower Series

Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles)

Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series

(yeah, these are smile.amazon.com links... if you aren't already supporting some organization with your Amazon purchases, how about my kid's school's PTA?)

Read 1491: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059

And: https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247

And: https://www.amazon.com/Columbus-Quest-Jerusalem-Religion-Voyages/dp/1439102376

Were you reading 1493? My dad's recommended this book but I haven't got around to it yet.

I'm a big fan of the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann regarding the history of the Americas before and after Colombus and all of the misconceptions about it and the most up to date analysis of the american cultures.

I completely disagree with Brexit but that's a fantastic writeup. Arguing that officials and politicians should make all decisions for us because "people are stupid duhhhhh" is arguing for rule by elites, whether u/Wootery likes it or not.

Wisdom of the crowds does exist (btw read this book if you want to be able to destroy all anti-democracy arguments). In fact, I would be willing to bet that a diverse group people could explain far better the Riemann Hypothesis than the best professors on Earth alone.

I read a book about this phenomenon in college, one of the few books I actually read in its entirety because it was just that good.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706

Basic and Applied Economics by Sowell.

Well, you're not far off. This book is very popular in libertarian circles: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

Economics in One Lesson should be required reading for all. Most people only look at the seen costs of projects but are ignorant of the unseen costs.

The advantages of learning about economics go way beyond understanding Bitcoin.

Economics (in the school started by Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, etc), is the study of how people act in order to achieve happiness. It asks: given people have certain goals (but without making any judgements on what those are), and limited time and resources to achieve them, how should they act to maximise their satisfaction? Even a man alone on a desert island is acting economically: should he spend another hour making shelter, another hour catching fish, or another hour relaxing in the sun? The economics of trade is built on top of this. Will one person with too much fish, and another with too much wood, discover they're both happier after trading than they were before, even though the total amount of wood and fish in existence has not changed? Indeed, the most important work on economics by Mises is called simply Human Action.

A few years ago I came across a book (Economics in One Lesson) which began with the following foreword:

>I strongly recommend that every American acquire some basic knowledge of economics, monetary policy and the intersection of politics with the economy. No formal classroom is required; a desire to read and learn will suffice. There are countless important books to consider, but the following are an excellent starting point: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat; Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard; The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, and Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan.
>If you simply read and comprehend these relatively short texts, you will know far more than most educated people about economics and government. … If you care about the future of this country, arm yourself with knowledge and fight back against economic ignorance.

I did exactly this and read them one by one. I summed up my findings in this blog post. I've found the books in the list above enough to defend against the biggest and most common fallacies you see in the news. I highly recommend reading at least one, if not all of them, and Economics in One Lesson is the one I recommend most.

You listen to those clowns at Chapo Trap House? Please do yourself and the world a favor and buy yourself one of these

I think the war is only a small part of why London shrunk. After the war the population was still over 8 million. It wasn't until the 1980s that the population bottomed out at about 6.5 million. The main reason the city started to shrink after the war was that the government had a deliberate policy to shrink it. As you can read here, neighbourhoods were bulldozed, a green belt established and office buildings banned. To modern eyes this seems ridiculous, but at the time many were of the opinion that big cities were bad for the country, and forcibly spreading out the population and economy to smaller cities and towns was seen as the best way forward.

On top of all this, the docks closed because they weren't suitable for container ships (for more on that, see this book). At one time that was one of London's biggest industries, so it had a predictably negative effect on population.

Edit: Also, with the dismantling of the Empire, London went from being the capital of a quarter of the world's people and land to being the capital of a bankrupt, struggling nation of about 60 million. It took time for London to find its new role in the world, and until it did its population declined.

http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282

• basically, the entire human observable history was eugenic.

If you frame this as a "our free market" vs "their central planning" debate, I have some recommended reading.

Economic planning, done right, can be incredibly beneficial.

Would that be before or after the USSR looted East Germany for anything of economic value?

As for growth, there's a reason I said "long term". Some measure of central planning is necessary for economic development (and, in fact, it is argued by some that the developed, capitalist world today owes its success to central planning and restricted trade during its earlier stages of development), but the levels of growth seen in the Eastern bloc were unsustainable. The collapse was not just some unfortunate event that derailed the great socialist experiment, it was its consequence.

> Dogecoin is up 75% in nine days. A nocoiner told me that's a reason why crypto is a complete joke. What do I say back?

Vitalik Buterin kept referencing this book in his tweets:

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

It's interesting throughout history what has been accepted and worked as money/currency. I think that we only have recent history as a reference so only trust government issued fiat which keeps having diminishing purchasing power because of its endless supply.

Basically it seems anything can work as a currency as long as there is network effect and trust is developed. There's even examples of silver that is stored but never ever even moved that act as a store of value while grains act the medium of exchange that are back up by silver in Sumerian civilization.

Oof, that's a tough one. I really like Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin and Whipping Girl by Julia Serano.

Right now the 'science' (better, the theory) of economics is standing on the top of not one but several, enormous, paradigm-destroying fault lines. Economics as we know it is not going to survive the next 20 years without being ripped to pieces, and born again, in a similar way to how physics, geology and biology underwent these changes in previous centuries. Your comment alludes to one such fault line:

>The government has a limited amount of money to distribute to the poor to try and improve their quality of life.

There is so much to unpack here and some risk of insufficient nuance, but here goes:

There is actually no limit to the money that the government could potentially create. Because money is created as 1s and 0s on a balance sheet, there is no real limit to the money that could be created. That's a technical/semantic point but nevertheless important to get right. There is no de facto scarcity of money. It is a limitless resource if ever there was one.

What the conventional consensus would next articulate is, yeah, but, there is some point at which money creation leads to runaway inflation. That is theoretically true, but we have strictly speaking no idea how high that ceiling is. Its theorized that this point is reached once a society's circulating currency outstrips its productive capacity - e.g. when an economy reaches full economic capacity, but increasing circulation of money allows humans to increase their demand even after this point. Its a complicated point because an increase in circulating currency, depending on how its distributed, would probably also lead to increased utilization of productive capacity and maybe even an increase in max productive capacity. See Germany under the Marshall Plan.

We don't have accurate models of how economies based on Universal Basic Income work or function historically, because economies like this haven't existed historically. We would be stuck in the position of trying to infer how one system behaves, possessing only data from completely different historical economic systems.

At this point in the debate, our lack of knowledge is usually rushed into a premature conclusion via talking points, the most near at hand being examples of hyperinflation from Zimbabwe and Weimar. Its clear that one of the main justifications within the mass mind for the non-viability of money printing, and thus the ongoing maintenance of the illusion of the scarcity of money, is this: money printing equals Weimar, money printing equals Zimbabwe. A no less money-printing-friendly organization than the Cato Institute performed a study of all recorded hyperinflations in the historical record and came to the conclusion that they were not monetary events: e.g. the collapse of industry and agriculture, or war, were always necessary precursors for a hyperinflation. Other historians have noted that the two hyperinflation events noted above, Weimar and Zimbabwe, were deliberately induced by the governments in question, and the Weimar inflation was also reversed without much effort on their part through a change in economic policy. So the spectre of hyperinflation - that ever-ready go-to boogeyman of Austrian economics - looms less large when one keeps those facts in mind.

One of the most important economic points for the general populace to wake up to at this point is that governments are not households. (the full video is here). Rodger Mitchell calls this the single most misunderstood fact in all of economics. This is a paradigm shift that results in a changed understanding of economics on the whole.

Public Debt is not debt. It is owed to no one, just as the entire supply of any given fiat currency was, at one time, created out of nothing. And public debt need not be paid back. It is best thought of as "Gross Domestic Currency Issuance" - e.g. "How Much Money We Created". A growing economy should have an ever-increasing money supply. Historically, paying off the national debt has resulted in depressions and recessions, and if you grasp these new facts, you understand why: nothing is actually owed to anyone when the government creates 1 billion dollars. It just creates that money ex nihilo. Conceptualizing money creation as a 'debt' was done for historical and psychological reasons, because it assuaged fears people had about the nature of where money comes from (which is, nowhere), and because it pays homage to a relic of the historical fixed exchange system, called the bond market. There is no need for a bond market. Governments do not need to pretend that IOU investment vehicles with promises to pay are somehow different than the currency they are placeholders for.

There you have it: money is not scarce. This is the copernican revolution in macroeconomic theory. The scarcity that currently exists is needless and without virtue. The bond market is a farce, taxes are largely unnecessary, the banking system is almost completely unnecessary, and the US could potentially create 3 to 4 times what it currently does in annual currency - depending on whose analysis you follow (I follow Stephanie Kelton's) - and distribute it for free to everyone - without noticeable negative economic repercussions, in fact, with tremendous positive gains resulting from this.

I know I sound like another internet revolutionary. But this is just one of the shifts in thinking that is going to destroy the foundation of traditional economics. Here is a YouTube channel with lots of informative videos explaining these concepts. For more you can check out Steve Keen's work in Debunking Economics; Richard Vague's analysis of the difference between public and private debt in The Next Economic Disaster (a crucial point to understand); Michael Hudson's ongoing refusal to submit to an economics that does not allow a critique of rent-seeking; Mark Blyth's analyses of Europe's austerity policies; anything by the Positive Money Movement; Thayer's original paper (no longer online)[see here]; and anything by the genius Richard Mosler. For wider concentric circles you can look at the anthropological work of David Graeber on the nature of debt and currency in traditional societies. There are a slew of other authors proposing alternative economic approaches - many related to the blockchain and cryptocurrencies - which I won't touch upon because its changing so quickly.

Have a look at Bad Samaritans. In short, the World Bank perpetuates economic neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies promote the liberalization of trade, which means that developing countries are not given the chance to nurture the infant industries that could make them competitive in world markets. Essentially, the World Bank is in the business of ensuring that developing countries never develop.

As I mentioned in my other comment, here's a breakdown of Bitcoin's security model. Before Bitcoin was created, everyone thought that it was impossible to provide such guarantees. Satoshi's solution to the Byzantine General's Problem was a breakthrough in Computer Science.

"Money" is just a collective agreement that something has value and functions well as a medium of exchange. If you think that money is something that must be provided by a government, I'd recommend that you educate yourself more about the history of money. A book I recommend is Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Money is a debt obligation. So when we take care of each other we get money. It is not when we get money we will take care of each other. Cart before the horse

I highly recommend you read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. It won't answer all your questions, and it is speculation, but it appears to me to present a fairly solid case for why all the doomsday scenarios (rise in global poverty, catastrophic climate change, resource shortages) are defeatable.

It's much easier to sell a paper and win a vote by spouting pessimism, but the truth is the future is looking increasingly bright.

uuugh - distant mirror was aaaaaawful. tuchman is so dry and boring. she drills down into more minutae than you can possibly handle. she did the same thing to ww1 in the guns of august. books like that make even a history buff like me cringe.

Leopolds ghost was good, but just watch the movie- I think seeing the severed hands and jungles visually makes a stronger impact.

Best book I have read lately is EASILY 1493.

http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247

This 1 hour video by the author gives you a great start to what it is about. If you find the video interesting, the book is GREAT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bghLhJ-c8os

Its so good, I have PAID my relatives to read it because its not typically the type of book in their reading wheelhouse. They loved it. SUUUUPER interesting and very relevant to understanding our world to this very day.

THIS book is the best book oof any kind that I have ever read in my life. AMAZING, but quite long. It covers the whooooole of history from millions of years ago till 1900. That book changed my life. Watson has written some extrordinary books. Great, sophisticated writer.

http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thought-Invention-Freud/dp/0060935642

Both of these are more general history covering a longer period rather than more specifc as above

edit: guns germs and steel is good, but has a thesis that can be grasped easily with just a wiki article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

the story, backround and color and other info in 1493 kinda overlaps guns germs, and treats it in a bit more of an interesting fashion. They are both kind of "why things are the way they are" books, which IMO is a super interesting topic

All these are my opinion, so take them with a grain of salt

Everyone should read that book. I have some caveats though. For crowds to be wise, they must have four things:

1. Diversity of opinion: This is very hard in an age of mass mediated talking points. With cable news and the internet, you can get "facts" in any flavor you want.
   
   
2. Independence: People don't let their opinions be determined by those around them. HA!
   
   
3. Decentralization: People can draw on local (not top down/centralized) information.
   
   
4. Aggregation: Private sentiments can be converted into an organized collective judgment.
   
   I'm not saying that crowds can't be wise. They can under ideal conditions. For that to be the case though, the person has to be rational in how they construct their beliefs and all four qualities must be present. Good luck with that.
   
   I'm not trying to debunk a strawman. Surowiecki does say that all these qualities have to be present for the crowd to be wise. As is often the case with big ideas though, this one has taken on a life of its own, to the point where a lot of people think that crowds are always right, regardless of whether the qualities are there or not.

until someone comes up with a good algorithm (I'm skeptical it will ever be accomplished), we're going to have to rely on the wisdom of the crowd, which, by the way, is not a bad way to go about this sort of thing: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706

Also jesus christ asterios not to be mean or anything but it seems like you don't even have a basic understanding of taxes and just regurgitate talking points about rich people.

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529

Read this book please

Relevant:

>An international poll conducted by The Economist magazine found more people in favor of protectionism than of free trade in Britain, France, Italy, Australia, Russia, and the United States. Part of the reason is that the public has no idea how much protectionism costs and how little net benefit it produces. It has been estimated that all the protectionism in the European Union countries put together saves no more than a grand total of 200,000 jobs--at a cost of $43 billion. That works out to about $215,000 a year for each job saved.

>In other words, if the European Union permitted 100 percent free international trade, every worker who lost his job as a result of foreign competition could be paid $100,000 a year in compensation and the European Union countries would still come out ahead. Alternatively, of course, the displaced workers could simply go find other jobs. Whatever losses they might encounter in the process do not begin to compare with the staggering costs of keeping them working where they are. That is because the costs are not simply their salaries, but the even larger costs of producing in less efficient ways, using up scarce resources that would be more productive elsewhere. In other words, what the consumers lose greatly exceeds what the workers gain, making the society as a whole worse off.

**

>Only part of the problem of getting the general public to understand international trade is due to their not having the facts. Another part of the problem is their not having enough knowledge of economics to withstand the barrage of self-serving arguments put out by many in business, labor, and agriculture, who wish to escape the consequences of having to compete in the marketplace with foreign producers.

-Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy* [link]

Economía e inversiones son dos cosas muy distintas. Los libros de economía que leí están en ingles y son:

• Basic Economics, de Thomas Sowell. Por lejos el mejor libro de economía para principiantes. Todos deberían leer este libro (y los demás libros de Sowell también). No es un libro tecnico. Se puede conseguir en español.
  
• Economics in One Lesson. Una versión extendida de La Falacia de la Ventana Rota. El primer concepto de economía que todos tienen que entender. Destruir algo como forma de crear trabajo tiene como consecuencia destruir el trabajo. Se puede conseguir en español.
  
• Economics For Dummies, de Flynn. Esta escrito por un profesor de economía, fue el primero que leí. Es muy bueno, pero le faltan un montón de conceptos que están en el libro de Sowell. Se puede conseguir en español.
  
• Economics, de McConnell y Flynn. Libro universitario de Economía, uno de los autores es el mismo que el de Dummies. Lo compre usado en AbeBooks, no lo termine de leer. Me parece muy completo.
  
  Una vez que leas y entiendas los tres primeros libros, las inversiones pasan a ser algo mas fácil de entender: como producir valor a partir del aire.

Ugh. Ok SJW. I dont feel like entertaining you anymore. Here read this , https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

LEARN SOMETHING.

>Automation — long a force in agriculture and manufacturing — is accelerating in the retail sector, a trend that could hamper efforts to bring down the nation's stubbornly high jobless rate.

This is stupid. See: Economics in One Lesson, chapter 7; the curse of machinery. For anyone on this subreddit who doesn't have that book: Amazon.

Invisible hook: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095

There's a pretty fascinating book about the economics of piracy called "The Invisible Hook" which strikes at a lot of the cliches about piracy; that they were always looking for a fight, that they'd slaughter crews, that they were cruel or arbitrary to fellow crewmembers, and that they were lawless barbarians in contrast to a more humane naval system. Pretty fascinating stuff.

If you look at past years' primary polls from before February of the season, you see complete mess. Here's 2012. The polls are meaningless that far out, and in every past primary, establishment endorsements helped choose an electable candidate. Silver used endorsements as a big factor in his analysis. His site even has a tracker that states "endorsements have been among the best predictors of which candidates will succeed and which will fail" which in every other primary was true. Normally, you couldn't just rely on the polls.

In finance, they say the scariest words are "This time it's different" where previous models that accurately made predictions no longer apply. Well, this time it's different. The large, shifting field of candidates made a lot of powerful Republicans abstain from endorsing anyone, and the hatred toward the Republican establishment made endorsements almost worthless. Anyone who read the polls and saw it coming were lucky unless they could also predict why the normally accurate model no longer applied. If they just relied on the polls, any other year they would've been wrong.

EDIT: One analyst who actually did predict that the old rules no longer applied was Norm Ornstein. He even wrote an article back in August titled "Maybe This Time Really Is Different"

https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

Good book. This Time Is Different: 8 Centuries of Financial Folly

> this time it'll be very very different

https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

>this time it feels different.

What could possibly go wrong...

Well there are instances where we had near anarchy such as the so called "wild west" which was one of the most peaceful times in human history.

Even the gold rush where many people (white, black, asian etc.) got together in a fiercely competitive and temporary environment, there were very few instances of recorded violence. Considering the circumstances and the fact that they were armed, it's quite astonishing to most people.

For more info you can read An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West by Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill the authors also have a book The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier.

(funny I am having this exact conversation in another thread)

We are operating anarchistically every day. In many ways, we succeed in SPITE OF the state, rather than because of it. The vast majority of our choices are just made with voluntary, organic interaction. Organic is the keyword here because complex systems work best when allowed to find the best-path via "bottom-up" organization (for example, skin cells forming Voronoi patterns).

Economics, as the observation of human action, "maximizes value" because of these really fundamental mathematical truths. Even services like security and rights claims are better served by a system that can adapt both in context and efficiency like this.

EDIT:

For a good discussion of this, see Everyday Anarchy by Stephan Molyneux (written well before he became a weird race-realist nut and abandoned his own principles for some reason I dunno maybe just that he's getting old).

For a good discussion of how such a society has worked in the past, check out the not so wild wild west paper.

Almost all varieties of potato, including most edible potatoes, contain toxic substances that dictate how they are prepared. Many South American varieties have to be thoroughly roasted, then eaten with a sauce prepared from clay and water. Most westerners don't know much about potato toxicity, apart from possibly having heard they belong to the deadly nightshade family. In any case there'd be no point in marketing the toxic, labor-intensive varieties in markets accustomed to foods that are easy to prepare and present no immediate health risk. If any of this interests you, check out 1493 by Charles C. Mann:

http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created-ebook/dp/B004G606EY

Socialism/Communism

A People's History of the World

Main Currents of Marxism

The Socialist System

The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)

Marx for our Times

Essential Works of Socialism

Soviet Century

Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)

The Meaning of Marxism

The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)

Of the People, by the People

Why Not Socialism

Socialism Betrayed

Democracy at Work

Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)

The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)

The American Socialist Movement

Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)

It Didn't Happen Here

Eugene V. Debs

The Enigma of Capital

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)

After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action

Capitalism

The Conservative Nanny State

The United States Since 1980

The End of Loser Liberalism

Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)

Economics: A New Introduction (must read)

U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)

Kicking Away the Ladder

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Traders, Guns and Money

Corporation Nation

Debunking Economics

How Rich Countries Got Rich

Super Imperialism

The Bubble and Beyond

Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents

Trade, Development and Foreign Debt

America's Protectionist Takeoff

How the Economy was Lost

Labor and Monopoly Capital

We Are Better Than This

Ancap/Libertarian

Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)

Man, State and Economy

The Machinery of Freedom

Currently Reading

This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1927/leisure-economics/

https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-Dethroned/dp/1848139926

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/law-of-value-8-subjectobject/

> invade the world

The Nazi's didn't invade the world and had no desire too. They were fighting a world war in different war theaters and fighting against an enemy that wanted to genocide them like their neighbors. https://imgur.com/a/xrie4N9. Hitler was embraced in France. He was embraced in Poland. Hell French soldiers were the last men defending his bunker. I'm not sure if you're being purposefully obtuse here or you're are just lost in the blue pill disinformation ocean built by the (((state historians))) version of history. You seem semi intelligent so I hope it's the latter because only one is fixable.

> Just like how the Nazi death squads rounded up Jews in Russia and shot them with their families doesn’t give me a pretext to go on a world crusade against the remnants of the ideology.

source on 'nazi death squads' shooting families.

> Is there evidence that Jews were responsible for the uprising? Can you show me some? I’ll analyze it if you do.

Well you can start with the early Jewish financier support for these revolutionaries.


https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X

The Spartacist uprising itself was almost totally jews.

The screenshot references the Wikipedia entry which lists the leaders and you can start diving into each of them if you wish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Levi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Levin%C3%A9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg

and keep in mind this is on Wikipedia which is heavily edited by the Israeli defense force and their social media manipulation teams in addition to other Jewish political groups.

https://saidit.net/s/altrightwebm/comments/klp/israels_internet_propaganda_war/

And then where we go from there is endless. You can read about the Myth of German Villainy which talks about Jewish involvement before and after the war manipulating perceptions of events and history.

If you're very new to revisionist historiography the over arching thesis is presented here.

http://rense.com/general34/amaz.htm

Even if you reject everything in this speech it's important to read to understand where revisionists are coming from

The library and biography of this man is also an important source of information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Z%C3%BCndel

Here's a great interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1BigVZifAY

edit. if you love primary sources here's another resource

https://www.ihr.org/

I don't think it is bullshit. This is the value of BTC as money, and money only. Bitcoin is also a store of value, a speculative asset, an edge against mainstream assets, etc...

The amount exchanged on exchange do not really matter as they are off chain and very high velocity, so don't contribute to the value of the asset as money.

Even if I assume your $200M is right, then the points still stands, most of BTC's value do not come from it's monetary use.

EDIT: Getting downvoted for reminding basic economics, bravo bravo ! You guys should spend less time on reddit and start reading this: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

I get painted as a radical in today's backwards world, but anyone who studies economics knows that politically motivated moves like this have no basis in economic reality. You can write whatever laws you want to write, that's not how the value of the dollar is decided. The purchasing power of the dollar adjusts according to its availability - and a number of other factors. Writing a law as simple minded as "you have to pay people more money" takes away from the purchasing power of the dollar. Although probably not the only factor, your rent went up as much as it did largely due to the increase in minimum wage. This is not "corporate greed" it is a functioning economy. It has been done countless times in human history, and yet here we are, actively continuing the bad practice into 2019 and beyond.

I realize this is not the place to get into a huge conversation about this necessarily, so I will stop myself, but if you or anyone is interested in a grounded view on the nature of an economy, I would highly recommend reading Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.

You need to read this, which you can buy for $0.99 used on Amazon (or probably $10 locally somewhere): http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422488301&sr=8-1&keywords=economics+in+one+lesson

Your arguments do not comport with economics.

Monetary policy, the most important tool for stabilizing prices and employment (and thus the cycle itself). See C19 or the great depression for examples of what no monetary policy or bad monetary policy looks like. This pretty much covers it.

> the biggest critique of them

I would say the absence of any form of capital (IE growth & mobility goes away) or markets to set prices (IE pretending marginalism does not real) are even more fundamental then the absence of monetary policy.

We are not capitalists. We don't have an ideological devotion to the economic system we have today, we study the emergent system of how humans interact and come up with ways to improve that. Having things like monetary policy and capital systems improves the welfare of everyone, attempting to replace reality with belief (be it collectivism or the Austrian breed of "free markets") might produce desirable outcomes when non-economists are writing about it but in reality wont.

That scarcity exists and can't simply be willed away is why collectivism does not work in reality.

No, not really.

In the U.S., life expectancy at age 20 has increased by ~50% since 1850. There are no "official" stats going back much further than this, although some researchers have attempted to guess based on wills, church records, etc.

As far as the book recommendations go, it would be good if you could qualify what kind of books you're interested in (e.g. philosophy, psychology, history, science, etc.).


Books I recommend:


Psychology (or: On Human Nature)

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

Thinking, Fast and Slow (my personal favorite)

The Undiscovered Self

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

History

Strategy: A History

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism

Economics

Economics in One Lesson

Basic Economics


Politics

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

As always, the list of books to read is too long, so I'll stop here.

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

> there are other people that don't have money because you have so much.

This is a common and unfortunately persistent misunderstanding of economic action, but it's easily remedied! Try Economics in One Lesson, which is also available for free all over the internet.

Try The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Paul Kennedy. It was writen in the early 80's before the fall of the soviet union so it has some dated world views, but it offers a great narrative of how the world power structure we know today evolved over the centuries from the 1500's.

I would pay extra taxes to buy all policymakers a copy of this book.

I may have completely missed part of the discussion, but has anyone recommended Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679720197

It seems like the quintessential book for the overarching topic.

We generally consider monetary policy to have started during the 30's as prior to this the fed effectively had no idea what they were doing, prior to this there were many theories floating about regarding how you would deal with monetary policy but the new (at that point semi-fiat) currency was very much an unknown so there was no data on the most effective way of managing it.

During the 20's the stock boom had people taking out loans they couldn't afford from banks and then repaying those loans with the return from their trades, most people believed market growth would continue for ever so banks were happy to extend the credit and while the growth trend continued everyone was happy. During this period the fed has a loose monetary policy, they were encouraging further growth by increasing the size of the money supply which keeps credit rates low.

In 1929 the belief of continuous growth came to an end and now you had a large number of people who were effectively bankrupt, banks holding loans they would never see repaid and banks themselves with very significant trading losses. Immediately after this the fed adopted a tight monetary policy, they started reducing the money supply in an effort to reduce investment activity and in doing so cause credit rates to skyrocket.

Today we understand this to be the polar opposite of what should be done. During a boom you operate a tight monetary policy, you cool off growth and ensure credit rates are high to avoid debt over-extension. During a recession you operate a loose monetary policy, you keep credit rates low which encourages borrowing so people can use credit to support consumption activity.

To say the impact of these policies was profound would be an understatement. At the time the financial sector was nowhere near as integrated with other sectors as it is today so if the fed had adopted a modern policy position we would have ended up with a relatively mild recession economy wide with a deeper recession in financial services. In terms of depth and scope it would have been similar to the '91 recession. If you are interested in learning more about this aspect I strongly recommend reading this book.

Having said that their reaction was entirely understandable, if the same situation had occured in 1909 instead of 1929 (and presuming the fed existed then) the policy response would be been appropriate as we were operating under the gold standard, they would have inflated/deflated based on the business cycle which is what they were attempting to do with printing. Our understanding of what occurred here was only really established during the 60's and consensus several decades later.

> Also, if you can, could you tell me if the New Deal improved, or made worse, the Great Depression?

This is still somewhat disputed. A great deal of new research was conducted since 2007 to help understand lessons from the past more completely to help with economic management today. Current research suggests that the answer or "improved" or "worsened" would be incorrect as the effects were wildly different between states. On a country wide scale the impact was likely a small positive, some states benefited while others took additional losses due to the programs.

In any case this wouldn't be regarded as "right" or "wrong" merely inefficient. Most economists would agree that ARRA was a net positive but that doesn't mean it was well designed or efficient, in pursuing a flawed policy an opportunity was missed in ARRA to do something which would have been more helpful. The New Deal is the same way, even though it probably had a small positive impact its poor design was a missed opportunity.

We can say for certainty that certain aspects of the new deal were poorly designed. The big one was the focus on public works, economic stimulus can be better considered as investment activity; you don't want to have the government hire people to do work rather you want to pay a private business to hire people to do work as that creates the consumption ripples you are looking for (AKA multiplier). This promoted Keynes himself to write a letter to FDR regarding the New Deal and they also exchanged a great deal of private correspondence (which FDR promptly ignored).

Its also worth mentioning that the dispute here arises as the great battle between monetary and fiscal policy has yet to be resolved. Many economists believe fiscal policy (particularly considering the inability of politicians to actually listen to economists on issues of economic policy) is relatively useless for economic management purposes and instead monetary policy is the only effective way to manage a business cycle. Empirical research currently leans in that direction (particularly given the debt load and advanced economy modifiers) but not sufficiently to call the issue resolved.

	

	

	

> # The End of Hyperinflation | AIER
>
>
>
> Image
>
> The ongoing collapse of Venezuela’s economy has grabbed some headlines, though the lessons from Venezuela’s tragedy may have gone under-reported. To the extent the tragedy has been covered, many writers have focused on the most glaring problem Venezuela’s economy is facing: hyperinflation.
>
> Tales of Venezuela’s bout with hyperinflation make for dire reading. But for students of monetary history, they give us a reason to re-examine the history of hyperinflations to see what lessons we can learn and what trends we can glean from the data.
>
> In a widely cited paper, Steve Hanke and Nicholas Krus (2012) document 55 cases of hyperinflation. What stands out, particularly if we focus our attention on the timing of these events?
>
> The first observation is perhaps the most obvious yet the most important: hyperinflation is unique to fiat money. No commodity-backed money has experienced hyperinflation. This is for the simple reason that the supply of a commodity-backed money cannot be manipulated, especially not for a sustained period of time, the way an unbacked paper money can.
>
> Only one recorded hyperinflation occurred prior to the advent of fiat money in the 20th century: the French inflation of 1796. It should come as no surprise that France’s hyperinflation occurred only after the assignat had been stripped of its commodity backing (assignats were initially backed by the value of lands confiscated from the Catholic Church in the wake of the French Revolution). The assignat’s demise foretold the fate of dozens of later experiments with fiat money.
>
> But didn’t the gold standard occasionally produce high and variable rates of inflation after the discovery of gold in the New World? Far from it. For all the bluster about the high, sustained inflation the Spanish economy endured in the 15th and 17th centuries after the discovery and pillaging of gold from the New World, the effects of this so-called price revolution are hardly discernible by modern standards. As Lawrence White (1999) notes, although inflation was high and variable by the standards of the day, the annual inflation rate in Spain over this period was less than 2 percent on average. Most modern central banks would kill for the inflation track record of the gold standard even in its darkest hour.
>
> A second observation highlights a silver lining in the dark cloud that is the tragedy of Venezuela: although hyperinflation spread like wildfire in the 20th century (thanks in large part to two world wars financed by fiat money in the first half of the century and the desperate death throes of many Soviet satellite states in the latter half), it has largely gone extinct in the Western World. The only two cases of hyperinflation in the 21st century are Zimbabwe (2007) and Venezuela. And both are the results of socialist governments’ writing checks they couldn’t cash.
>
> So where has all the hyperinflation gone? Has hyperinflation breathed its final breath in the Western World?
>
> To answer the first question: hyperinflation has largely gone the way of the dodo for two reasons. For starters, our understanding of monetary policy and in particular what drives sustained inflation has drastically improved over the past century. This is particularly true in the wake of the monetarist counterrevolution. It’s true that economists for centuries knew that substantially high rates of inflation were driven by monetary factors. Ludwig von Mises was certainly aware of this after witnessing the German and Austrian hyperinflations firsthand. But Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s (1963)work arguably did more than anything to firmly establish this idea among scholars and policy makers. It reinforced the idea (in the words of Friedman) that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” It gave it strong empirical backing, especially as later scholars built on their framework to examine nations that had more extreme histories of inflation. The tight causal connection between money and inflation might’ve been neglected or dismissed by earlier policy makers. But it can no longer be ignored or denied. And neither can the culpability of any political party or leaders who resort to the printing press as a last-ditch effort to finance their delusional spending schemes.
>
> Another reason hyperinflation has largely vanished from the Western world is the simple fact that inflationary finance has universally proven to be a disaster. It’s a cure worse than the disease for any political leader who hopes to stay in power. Sure, dictators like Nicolas Maduro and Robert Mugabe might be able to maintain their stranglehold on power even amid the torrent of hyperinflation (for now at least). But as the Weimar government in Germany in the 1920s learned the hard way, no truly democratic regime can survive the disasters of hyperinflation. As it turns out, voters don’t like seeing the value of their life savings evaporate. Nor do ordinary citizens appreciate the utter economic chaos that accompanies hyperinflation. So if monetary theory isn’t enough to convince policy makers to keep their hands off the printing press, political self-interest and self-preservation likely is.
>
> The answer to the question of whether we’ve seen the end of hyperinflation in the developed world is, to borrow a phrase from College Gameday icon Lee Corso, “Not so fast.” It’s true that cases of hyperinflation have lessened dramatically in recent decades. But past performance is no indicator of future results. The populist movements that gave rise to socialism in Zimbabwe and Venezuela are beginning to rear their heads in many Western nations. Many of the key pillars of the Washington Consensus have also begun to erode because of nationalist pressures. In short, while I don’t think we’ll see anything nearing very high inflation or hyperinflation in the United States anytime soon, it could happen. The mere possibility that we might completely abandon sound monetary principles is something that should motivate everyone interested in monetary economics to remain vigilant. We should not forget that Venezuela was one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America before its recent demise.
>
> As the late historian and political philosopher Richard M. Weaver wisely noted: “Ideas have consequences.” Bad ideas breed misguided policies and bad outcomes. Good ideas breed prosperity. So keep up the good fight. Economics is as important today as ever before. As Mises so eloquently said with his trademark German optimism in the final sentence of Human Action, if we allow people to disregard economics, “they will not annul economics; they will stamp out society and the human race.”

• • • • • -
          
          Owner | Source Code | Stats

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Monetary-Institutions-Lawrence-White/dp/0631212140

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Monetary-1867-1960-National-Economic-Publications/dp/0691003548/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1I2H70WSYRZA8&keywords=a+monetary+history+of+the+united+states&qid=1555601092&s=books&sprefix=a+monetary%2Cstripbooks%2C140&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Federal-Reserve-1913-1951-v/dp/0226520005/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_3?keywords=a+history+of+the+federal+reserve+meltzer&qid=1555601148&s=books&sr=1-3-fkmrnull

A Monetary History of the United States

https://www.amazon.ca/Monetary-History-United-States-1867-1960/dp/0691003548

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Marc Levinson

http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408/ref=la_B001ILOBWI_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397101651&sr=1-1

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Business Books of 2013 (chosen by guest critic Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft)

> Het boek gaat over de opkomst van de zeecontainer.

Ah, iets als dit? was een erg intressant boek, behalve die ongein over de "unions", vond ik wat langdradig.

I am only halfway through it through but I am really enjoying, "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" and I am not learning so much about the box or the power of standardization, which is I think the main driver of the book. Instead I am learning about maritime business, Longshoreman Unions in New York and what the United states means by "Free Trade".The book takes from perspective of a few businessmen, like Malcom McClean who started as an independent truck works his way to creating a truck fleet then eventually a fleet of international cargo ships. There are many peoples stories in here and the simple idea to standard shipping for cost savings, put countless out of work and created work for countless others. I am in the middle of the chapter on how this business strategy change our logistical strategying the Vietnam War and brought Japanese goods to America to economically for the first time.

I really liked "Catastrophe 1914", Before reading this I had only a paltry understanding of the world politics that led to the existence of the European forces that set the creation of the modern nation-state into action. WW1 was more than a war, it was the The World War. It saw the end of the horseback cavalry charge and the deployment of the machine gun. WW1 was about more than technologies, it was people trying to have what they thought was theirs and meeting resistance.

Edit - Amazon links
http://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-1914-Europe-Goes-War/dp/0307597059
http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller/dp/0691136408

I think downward social pressure is an important point in this discussion and raises a bunch of interesting economic and ethical issues .

Side stepping those issues for a moment, an interesting data point is Gregory Clark's book A Farewell to Alms which is about how downward social pressure impacted England in the 1600's. Clark's argument is that limited land and the Malthusian trap (which was more prevalent in England than Europe because England is an island) caused the children of rich children in England to move down the social ladder which crowded out the poor and essentially pushed them off the ladder. Clark also claims that these new lower class workers had more upper class values which made them more industrious and better works which in turn provided England with the labor force necessary to get a jump start on the industrial revolution, though this second claim clearly has issues (e.g. did the morals really make that big a difference; couldn't economic incentives teach people to be industrious rather than the values needing to be taught by wealthy parents or grand parents). That said, I think the first claim is spot on as a positive claim (though I don't endorse the normative claim that it's good since that smacks of social darwinism).

Jumping back to today, we were already seeing some of this happening prior to the great recession where lower middle class men aren't able to get married and start families because of poor financial prospects, driven partly by lack of education. I think the great recession though is only making things worse as the generation that graduated from 2008 to today is seeing similar diminished opportunities and will increase that downward pressure.

So it will be very interesting to see how this plays out. There's clearly huge economic concerns at stake (e.g. how do you stop people from investing $200k into education for a career which pays $30k and how do you stop the educational arms race) but there's also huge ethical issues too (e.g. is there an intrinsic value to education? who deserves to be educated and on what basis? what do you do about those who get left behind?).

Coming to this a little late but wanted to say that (a) I completely agree, and (b) I'd take it a little further.

The thought that there was some Valhalla of wonderful food in earlier days is easily proven wrong. We live in the best time for eating there has ever been. For instance this article explains at some length and convincingly to me that food has only improved. Think about it - name one major city in the US where food was better 15 years ago. I can't think of any.

And if you go back further in time, you find that agriculture is coincident with higher population but also with malnutrition. This book is awful in some parts but it explains at length the accepted knowledge that agriculture = more people, but is also = disease and malnutrition at significant levels.

Skipping forward, I think 'modern' agriculture starts with crop rotation, Source, and pretty soon you have the British Agricultural revolution that kickstarts the industrial revolution.

Coincident with that you have the greatest rise in per-capita GDP there has ever been. Source, The Great Divergence.

And then that's why I get to work at a desk instead of doing mind-numbing, back-breaking work in the fields, and that's why I enjoy more material plenty than anybody could imagine 200 years ago, and why I can choose among multiple places, in my major urban center, to get pretty damn good pho. Lo those many years ago when I was young, sushi was a foreign concept. Now I can get it (or a rough approximation of it) in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere.

There is a downside to removing people from their food. There is also a downside to industrial agriculture. A lot of folks eat out more often. We have lost the spiritual connection to our food in large part that is created by hunting for your food or growing it and shepherding it the whole way through. We don't take food as seriously, and we don't contemplate as closely where it came from. We are complicit in the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi and in the overuse of antibiotics in, and ill-treatment of, our livestock, to name but a couple examples.

But come the fuck on. I more than likely owe my life to my forebearers moving away from the fields and working in factories. I certainly owe my material comforts to that. I don't have to wonder whether I'm going to have a crop failure and starve to death.

That some of us can turn back and re-discover a better connection with food is a wonderful luxury. Appreciate it as such.

There were four different econ history courses at mine! One of them is on iTunes U, if you're so inclined. And/or you can buy the professor's (very reasonably priced) book. It's a light read.

^(Please ignore the normative policy implications of the title. The author just wanted to be clever. Source: I took his class.)

>I think this time is fundamentally different.

That's what the financial folk thought about the bubble

http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691142165

Anthony De Jasay is one the most smartest yet underappreciated libertarians I guess. Just look up on his books. Besides that Edward Stringham and Peter Leeson are important figures. I always liked Bruce Benson's works. You should also read his article enforcement of property rights in primitive societies

This article on wild west is excellent. It's based on their book Not So Wild, Wild West

I mentioned Peter Leeson, his article on pirates An-Arrgh-Chy is a different perspective on organization outside the state, his book on same subject, The Invisible Hook is a must read. Also his article on Somalia, Better off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse is perfect.

And this is another article on law and justice by Bruce Benson.

Economist here! A common definition of a government/state is a "legal monopoly of coercion." Anarchy is simply a situation where that is absent. And just as some governments have been awful and others benevolent and good, anarchy per se is neither. The real question is whether anarchy can allow a flourishing and peaceful society to exist? Of course there are also important normative questions: is a radically decentralized system of power likely to be better or worse than one with fairly centralized authority?

A great place to start is Bruce Benson. There are people who write about "Anarcho-Capitalism" mostly from the Austrian economics enthusiasts, and as fringe as these folks are, there's something to it. Benson attacks an important part of the problem by asking about the workings of the legal system in a state setting and in non-state settings.

A book I haven't read, but that I've heard good things about is The Invisible Hook. Ask yourself this: where do you least expect social cooperation with decentralized authority? Maybe a place filled with short-sighted, uneducated, criminals. An 18th century pirate ship is just such a place. And yet it turns out pirates were among the first to establish checks on central authorities with constitutions.

Another hard case is the case of prisons. And yet the prison economy is flourishing with drugs, cell phones, and other contraband changing hands in a market dependent on trade and cooperation. This happens in spite of a central authority outlawing this activity. Think Soviet black markets in music, except instead of innocent Russians you've got some pretty un-peaceful dudes.

All of these situations shed important light on the possibility of anarchy. They show that some of our basic assumptions about the role of government rest on shakier foundations than we might have thought. People can, and probably will cooperate. Just as surely, they will try to rip each other off. But of course that's true in government too.

Because that's how people think.

I think the majority of people in this sub need to read this book

So you're saying "this time is different?"

> Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learne

https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640/

Account of one of the first govt debt "crisis" (more for the lender than the borrower), Phillip II in the 16th century: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lending-Borrower-Hell-Princeton-Economic/dp/069117377X

The market has changed significantly since the 16th century but it is crisis are fairly common (there are several going on right now). Argentina, for example, is a serial defaulter (I think they have defaulted ~6 times) and they have just applied to the IMF...again, after exiting default completely a couple of years ago. It is important to understand that debt crises are dissimilar (for example, it matters whether your debt is owned domestically) but they are all damaging.

I'm not sure if I should be using the silver sticky for this but here goes. I took some basic macro and macro classes a while back as part of my minor and in one of them we had an extra credit reading assignment that I really enjoyed (http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640). I was just curious what the opinion of the book is on any of the people who are more more informed in general.

You still have to connect that problem with technological displacement. I mean Rogoff and Reinhart wrote a book saying that financial recession are long lasting and that the long term effects of it are well understood. http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

Still you can clearly say that the Fed and the federal government did not do enough. Austerity was a problem and was counterproductive and the Fed should have pushed for a higher inflation target or go the market monetarist route and pushed for a NGDP level targeting.

The understanding is that unemployment is caused by friction in the market and when the economy shrinks due to a bubble bursting or what not, the wages are "sticky" so they do not adjust and instead people are laid off. That is a harm to the economy that we are experiencing right now. Governments doing nothing to boost the economy and the Fed not committing to a higher inflation target is keeping the economy underperforming.

Det finns garanterat mer än ett alternativ till en marknadsekonomi. Och gång på gång ser vi även marknadsekonomier fallera, men vi har inte ens en diskussion kring hur vi skulle kunna skapa ett bättre system, så vi kör på same old igen och väntar på nästa krash. Jag kan rekommendera This Time is Different som går igenom statistik och data från 1800 till idag och visar på hur ingen ekonomi i världen klarat sig från någon form av krash. Uppenbarligen är något fel med det nuvarande systemet, men det finns ingen som vill/vågar/orkar ta diskussionen om ett nytt system.

The realistic answer is that private property is defined as "that which you can defend." If you have an apple tree in your front yard, the assumption is that a small percentage of that fruit will be taken by sojourners since guarding it 24/7 would be impractical and would not be cost effective. Likewise if you claim to own 10,000 acres of land but squatters occupy 1,000 acres, realistically only 9,000 of those acres are your property. Socialists would be totally okay with this if they had any semblance of ideological consistency or pragmatism.

But obviously private property as a construct is necessary for society. So in an anarcho-capitalist society people would take measures to secure their property in a communal fashion, i.e. arbitration and hired security guards. It would be similar to the system that early settlers had in Texas where the "homeowners association" you would willingly join would essentially fulfill all purposes that the government does. And it was very effective by the way.

Homeless people do not automatically go to jail.

I really am not following the idea that capital requires tax, it makes no sense whatsoever. Just because so far everything approaching modern capitalism has occurred since the 1700s (in which time the state was already established) then you can't say that therefore since capitalism is younger than the state and always coexisted with it, therefore it requires it, it doesn't necessarily follow. It's a classic case of "correlation is not necessarily causation."

There were actually parts of the american west where capitalism actually existed for a period of decades without there being any state representatives or presence in those unincorporated areas. The settlers expanded quicker than the state was able.

So in actual fact you're incorrect in that assertion that it's "never happened before."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Not-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

I won't be replying any more because I have things I need to finish before bed.

I'd say that the closest thing to anarchism is probably ancient iceland, where you could pick your chieftain, who would serve as your arbiter and would enforce law on you, and you could switch at any time. Crime rates were extremely low.

However, it was not anarchist. It did have some elements of polycentric law, and that's about as close as we can get in that regard.

I think the "not so wild wild west" was as close as you can get in the modern age. There is a book called The Not So Wild Wild West (http://www.amazon.com/The-Not-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543) which is a fantastic read about the myths of the frontier west.

>and they tend to forgot about things like roads, street lights, stop signs, school zones, police, fire departments, etc.

Do you know there are places where these things are already provided by the private sector? There already are private police and security forces, private and volunteer fire departments, privately maintained roads, private courts of arbitration and so on... and I'm not referring to Somalia. I'm referring to places in the western world, here in the United States.

>just that I thought this was already tried and what ended up was the wild wild west and robber barons.

Give this and this a read some time. "I thoughts" don't mean much if you've only approached the issue from one perspective.

In America, the false narrative of the 19th century American "robber barrons" (such as Rockefeller) is frequently used as an excuse for bigger government and regulation. Do Australians point at those American robber barons as an excuse to implement the same crap domestically, or does Australia have its own version of the robber barons?

BTW, there were actual robber barons, as Ayn Rand pointed out, but they were the ones who used government to club competition. The wealthy industrialist who accomplished things w/o government interference were not robber barons. The Rockefeller family happens to include both b/c the Rockefellers were instrumental in the the formation of the Federal Reserve System. One of my favorite quotes on the Fed by former Fed Chairman Paul Volker: "[bailouts are] the most basic function of the Federal Reserve. It was why it was founded." And true that is.

I think Japan was very protectionist in what products it would let in. Was and still is.

Korea did the same thing post Korean War to become the industrial power it is today. Went from poorer than Bottswana to what it is now.

Really great book discusses how great powers become great -- easy, wonderful read:

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

Read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395673735&sr=1-1&keywords=bad+samaritans

Free markets do work... with a caveat. Right now they are being used to keep poor nations poor.

All of the rich nations today got there using policies that are not neoliberal at all, and pushing neoliberalism on a poor nations keeps them poor.

For example, there is a country in africa that wanted to invest in solar energy and start producing them. the US advised then to follow free market principles, which mean the government should not subsidize or invest in that industry. So... no solar panels. The country doesnt have enough wealth to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, so if the goverment doesnt subsidize a new industry, it is much more likely to fail.

here is another quick example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html?pagewanted=all

Malawi was starving following free market ideas. The government subsidized fertilizer and now they are feeding themselves AND exporting food to neighboring countries.

Your comment is very naive, dont fall for the propaganda.

The point about scab goods isn't specific to the border. The idea is that scab products get rejected regardless of where they are produced. Now, judging whether the union involved in genuinely democratic and not racist isn't something we can generalize about. Democracy has to deal with these issues on a case by case basis. Dealing with them somewhat imperfectly or even arbitrarily is better than ignoring them and continuing to support slave labor practices.

Rather than spending your time nitpicking about current tariff rates (which tell you nothing about the history of a nation's development), why don't you read more thorough and comprehensive analysis of the history of development?

In addition to the recent IMF admission about some aspects of economic liberalism that they imposed as loan conditions leading to boom and bust cycles that impoverished their victims beneficiaries, there is a strong argument by Ho-Joon Chang based on actual history that today's economic superpowers―from the U .S. to Britain to his native Korea―all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry.

This is just a reframing of the one argument you all bleat like sheep, the answer is supposed to lead back to the body count. In realty your question rules out those regimes.


Catalonia is a good example.

Highly democratic, worker owned and controlled co ops.


On a large scale, nationally owned industry. Which is still an important part of any economy, nationalized health care, large scale state investment in modern infrastructure too.



Social democracy got us out best gains.


Liberalism just kept most poor, and now we have Neo liberalism its stagnation or going backwards as is the emerging trend.


https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

Yeah nice job with the revisionist history. https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500865163&sr=1-1&keywords=bad+samaritans

Here's a book from an anthropologist who has studied the evolution of economies throughout world history. Humans are actually much more likely to simply use a debt-based system instead of bartering for exchanges when they do not have money to represent transactions. Bartering never happens in real time as you described. You don't wait for me to actually go get the roof fixed before you fix my PC. You just do the favor, and I owe you one.
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

I think you would get a lot out of reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years... It speaks to "nation that is built on money that I will never be able to make" and your feeling of defeat being by design... I found the conclusion surprisingly hopeful/helpful.

I like this book by David Graeber where he talks about whole economic systems are necessary to support civilizations with technologies. The pattern has been that they unwind on a multicentury cycle when too many people get into deep debt to the point that they can't support themselves enough to efficient work or participate. Rome is just one example - there were a striking number of advanced technologies during that time, but after the empire fell apart, society couldn't use them even though they were still described in books. So during Rome they had technology but also slavery, debt etc. During the middle ages they were illiterate but there was less prostitution and slavery. https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Mortgages on houses are a special situation, and treated differently then all other debts here. And what you are saying about just walking away from houses is only the law in a few states, and in those states, the worst of the housing bubble happened (Florida, Nevade, etc.). So I agree with you on that count. Here in New York, if I stopped paying my mortgage and walked away, the bank would sell my house, and if they didn't get all their money back, they would sue me for the rest.

With regard to other debts however, it isn't that you just walk away, and they are gone. You file for bankruptcy, and then a judge takes over your money situation to settle debts the best way possible. So the court will sell all your stuff to pay you creditors, and then they will work out a reasonable payment plan where a reasonable portion of your income goes to pay more of your debt. You will also not be able to borrow any money for at least 8 years. If there is just simply too much debt, some of it will get discharged. But since lenders are aware that this is how the system works, it should make them be careful who they lend to, so that they don't lose money.

So it isn't that you just get away with not paying, it is just worked out so you can not end up homeless and a permanent debt slave. Think about someone who bought a house in Spain a few years ago, and now their house is worth 1/3 what is was. The economy is terrible, and you lose your job. You want to do the right thing, and try to sell your house to pay the bank back, but you still end up owing them hundreds of thousands. Because you can not get a good job again, you end up cleaning toilets for very little money. The bank will keep taking your paychecks for the rest of your life, and you will never recover. Your family will have no future, your kids will be screwed and the whole lot of you will end up on welfare, costing the government money. The whole time this is going on, the bank barely gets paid anything, because you make so little money, so it isn't like they will ever get paid back.

In this scenario, everyone loses, the bank, the family and the government. And it isn't like this person did anything wrong, they bought a house for their family, and then the economy went terribly bad. This person would be much happier being employed and paying his mortgage, but he just can't.

This permanent indebtedness is what gave birth to the feudal system, where people ended up trading their lives and land to the lord of the manner. If you would like to read up on it, I suggest this http://www.amazon.com/dp/1612191290

I also should have mentioned that the bankruptcy court will take into account if someone did try to just walk away or commit fraud, and will impose very harsh terms on them. The whole point of American bankruptcy is not to punish people literally forever, who were making sounds choices, and taking reasonable risks in good faith. It has really prompted entrepreneurship, and been very benfical to us.

Capital - Thomas Piketty

http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454194050&sr=1-1&keywords=thomas+piketty

Debt - The First 5000 Years - David Graebner

http://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454194089&sr=1-1&keywords=debt+david+graeber

Progress ise mõraneb või lääne inimeste usk progressi mõraneb?

Igatahes, soovitaks lugeda raamatut nimega Rational Optimist:

> For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.

> In his bold and bracing exploration into how human culture evolves positively through exchange and specialization, bestselling author Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. An astute, refreshing, and revelatory work that covers the entire sweep of human history—from the Stone Age to the Internet—The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.

There is a great book by Matt Ridley which argues that on pretty much every measurable scale life is better today than in any period in history.

For example higher life expectancy, access to education, likelihood of dying a violent death.

> Peru. I want to learn more about the history of that place, and visit machu pichu. Very interested.

I've read and recommend:

• Turn Right at Machu Picchu
  
  
• The Last Days of the Incas
  
  
• Andes
  
  
• 1491 and 1493

>So where are they or their civilizations today?

Lehite successor states were ground to pieces by a combination of disease epidemic, climate change, and European aggression like the rest of America's endemic nations.

If you haven't read them, I highly recommend 1491 and 1493.

>Where were they when they were at their peak?

That's a great question that is not answered by modern revelation. John Clark thinks Joseph Smith believed that Book of Mormon events occurred around the Yucatan peninsula. I agree with him but I'm happy to cede ground if future evidences don't support that.

> Based on DNA and archaeology, it's a tough case, no?

Not really. This is an article you may (or may not) enjoy:

https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng

I found that its cautions were very prescient.

I recommend reading this:

https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492224969&sr=8-1&keywords=1493

if you are interested in a counter-argument. Europe got a massive leg up from exploiting the Americas' natural resources - it gave them a huge advantage sometimes inadvertently (like flooding China with silver, which demolished the Chinese economy) and sometimes unexpected ways (the potato and many other plants from the Americas made Europe's nutrition much better than the rest of the world, or access to rubber, etc.)

> You need to understand math before discussing economics or you might as well be discussing religion or philosophy.

Counterpoint: Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell. Very informative and insightful. Not Austrian. No math.

> One question I have though is regarding internet equality. Specifically, if Libertarian is for zero government involvement in business, that wouldn't a Libertarian say that if an internet service provider wanted to prioritize or slow down traffic for certain websites, then it is their right to do so?

Yes, generally (if they should is another issue, of course). Though we would also say that the reason there is no competition between ISPs is because of government regulation. In areas where ISPs actually compete with each other, their service generally tends to be quite good.

>any limiting of the internet, be at speed or censorship, might as well be another form of oppression.

Someone inconveniencing you is not oppression. When the ISPs start shooting people in the streets for uploading the wrong YouTube video, you can call it oppression.

> I believe that the right to own guns should not be taken away from us. But to me, background checks, psychological screening, and training are not exactly bad.

So, you're okay leaving the decision of if you have that right to a government bureaucrat that, I promise, does not let their own political or personal views influence their decisions at all?

Would you be okay with a government bureaucrat pre-screening and approving your reddit posts? You know, just to make sure they aren't terrorism. Make sure you fill out the paperwork right and everything will be fine, I promise.

> I tend to think that corporations generally shouldn't be allowed to fund campaigns.

Corporations are run by people, why can't I run my company the way I want, including supporting whomever I'd like?

And what actually constitutes "funding campaigns"? Can I put a pro-Rand-Paul logo on my website? In the lunch room? Can I show up on TV and say I'm voting for Rand? Can I put up a YouTube video talking about how I like Rand's policies? A TV ad?

Do you want to live in a country where a CEO posts a nice video of how Rand's policies will impact their business, and then gets thrown in jail for illegally contributing to his campaign?

> A corporation-backed candidate would have the advantage in any campaign when compared to smaller, independent candidates.

Historically, this is not true. The overwhelmingly vast majority of elected officials are not backed by any corporation, let alone large ones.

The reason presidents, senators, and representatives are often supported by corporations is--surprise surprise--they want the politicians to pass laws that harm their competition (remember the only way monopolies can exist?). Libertarians say that legislation like that should not be passed, and, consequently, corporations will have no incentive to attempt to influence elections.

> What are your views on the "no-fly" list debacle?

No due process; if it's not illegal, it's immoral.

> If a business is allowed to deny service to a person for one of the above reasons, aren't their rights being violated?

As a guy who's not straight, let me tell you: I don't want anti-gay people making my wedding cake. I want them to voluntarily put a big huge sign in front of their store that says "NO GAYS" so I know not to accidentally give them my money. Forcing them to serve me is absolutely unethical.

> Even if they aren't being violated based on that service alone, wouldn't the ability to do this eventually lead to groups of people being shunned or outcast, thereby violating their rights?

No.

> Most Libertarians would be for allowing immigrants into the country and creating a path to citizenship for them, right?

We already have this, it's called "legal immigration." It's hideously dysfunctional, like all government programs, but it exists and does not need to be "created."

> I've seen little on this sub to determine whether or not a Libertarian would be for allowing Syria refugees into the country.

Because libertarianism is not a cures-all-the-world's-evil-with-this-one-weird-trick philosophy.

Some problems are hard, sorry.

> I am pro-gay rights and gay marriage, and can't really pinpoint a "common" Libertarian sentiment on the topic though.

Historically libertarians have been ridiculously pro-gay rights and gay-marriage (well, and anti-government-being-involved-in-marriage, but that's another story).

> I am of the opinion that with a basic education, future generations will be able to obviously create more informed thoughts, decisions, and figure out better future for themselves.

You're young and naive, we get it.

> Wouldn't a national standard aid in this goal?

No, absolutely not. Teachers are supposed to be subject matter experts. Why the hell should a bureaucrat who knows nothing about a subject be telling an expert how and what to teach?

> I can't really make an informed decision regarding student loans.

They're a huge clusterfuck caused by massive government distortions of both the higher education and student loan markets.

> If the current idea is to tax the rich more to pay for a higher education and make it free. Which is a noble goal, but taxing this rich (to Libertarians I'm sure) would be a direct violation of rights.

And, more importantly, wouldn't solve the problem. The market distortions were caused by government intervention--throwing even more money at it will only make it worse!

> Other views I hold, that would contradict a Libertarian's, are that vaccinations should be required (I believe you're putting others in danger by not doing so)

Look--"required" means, to the government, "we will send people with guns to your house and force you to, and kill you if you resist." Are you okay with enforcing vaccination in this manner?

Sure, the government may start with nice letters, but eventually CPS and the Swat team show up at your house, take your kid, and vaccinate him against your will. And then, oops, it turns your kid was allergic to the vaccine just like you've been telling them for the past 15 months, but the bureaucrat (who can't be fired and has legal immunity) fucked up your exemption paperwork and now your kid is dead.

OTOH, if a private school had a policy that kids needed to be vaccinated--no child murder.

I'm sure you think I'm being extreme, so here's an example: the media has recently claimed that 307,000 veterans have died while waiting for care since 1998. If that were true, that would be ~1,500 dead/mo. Or, to be dramatic, one 9/11 worth of dead every other month. That's a lot of people. The VA disputes this on the grounds that, and I quote: "[the database is] unreliable for monitoring timeliness or determine if a record represents a veteran’s intent to apply for VA health care." Their defense is that they are too incompetent to even attempt to keep track of if people are even seeking care. Consequently, they can't even tell us what the real number is.

Do you want those people to be responsible for safely vaccinating your child? I sure as hell don't!

> I do not support the death penalty

AFAIK most libertarians don't. Some do, though.

> As you can no doubt tell, Im a very ill informed on the details of Obamacare, Foreign Policy, and other broader topics. I am trying to fix that though.

You should start with some economics classes. Having a real understanding of even the most basic economics will get you much further than knowing trivia about specific policies like Obamacare.

Here's a good popular-level intro: http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529
But you should take real classes, too.

> Now, on candidates, I'm surprised at the anti-Bernie sentiment in this sub.

Socialism is literally anti-libertarianism.

> As I understand it, Libertarians are for starting everyone on common ground, but then leaving them to their own devices afterword, regardless of whether or not they need help.

No. Libertarians are for not forcing anyone to help someone else (and to help their way or you are going to prison).

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529

You should read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. It essentially goes over all the fundamental economic principles and he answers that question.

My (relatively poor) summary is: We have a huge amount of resources. That's has never, and for the foreseeable future, will never be the problem. There is simply a cost to finding and extracting those resources. As our technology increases, so does our access to those resources (this can include recycling as extraction) because the cost goes down.

Seriously, though, if there is one book everyone should read before discussing economics, that is it. That way they can spot the plethora of inaccuracies in logically-dead posts like that of noamsky's.

The other guy has presented nothing but insults, incase you hadn't noticed.

Do you live in Australia? I have not provided numerical facts. However It is a fact that it takes 2 months to receive benefits, it is a fact that you need to obtain and present more ID than homeless teenagers have immediate access to, it is a fact that there are families that are intergenerationally dependent on welfare, and that in some areas they are relatively common. How common I don't know, there is no data on that, American data suggests around 5% of the population is stuck in an integenerational poverty cycle, I don't imagine this is much different in Australia, although it is probably less here.

Data suggests that governments are on average about 30% efficient, whereas charities range from 40 to 85% efficient, don't donate to the shitty ones.

Why are governments inefficient?
Read this http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374490137&sr=8-1&keywords=basic+economics

Read the article I posted, and read the Australian government expenditures publications,if you can navigate them, they are intentionally obtuse and difficult to read, and only exist because of laws requiring them to exist.

The inefficiency is because of the cost of employing too many bureaucrats roughly 60-70% of the budget of most departments, I know this because I used to work in the offices of the shadow minister for materiels. Having also used government welfare infrastructure, the bureaucrats are unnecessary, and incompetent. What is needed is accountability for the recipients of welfare, and a cap on total amount of accessible welfare. This prevents abuse, and allows it to be used as a safety net, and creates demand for private charities to provide employment rehabilitation, and allows for the amount of welfare available to be increased as it is limited in time frame. It also increases the incentive to be responsible for ones self.

You managed to write an awful lot there without explaining how the Liberals giving Honda $82 million somehow ensures that they will remain in the country when they were investing billions into their plants without that grant. You said yourself that it hasn't stopped companies packing up and leaving the province. There is simply no evidence that this money is keeping them here.

The negative economic effects of subsidies for private business are well documented and not a matter of ideology. I encourage you to read about them. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell are good places to start.

I'd start with [Economics in One Lesson by Hazzlit](
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1)

It's easy to read, easy to understand, no strange jargon, puts things very simply, primarily using logic and examples.

And try to thoroughly understand:

1.) Benefits of voluntary exchange

2.) Law of Comparative Advantage

3.) Broken Window Fallacy


For further reading, I'd try Ayn Rand's collection of essays called Capitalism the Unknown Ideal - that was a huge influence for me, again, quite readable and easy to understand. And finally Ludwig von Mises's The Anti-Capitalist Mentality.

This looks like it's exactly what i'm looking for!

• A free html version
  
• A 193 page free pdf version
  
• The kindle version for $10
  
• The paperback version is 218 pages and $11 on Amazon

I would recommend Economics in One Lesson (which you can also buy here) because it teaches you how to use reasoning in economics and figure out where people are using bad logic in their economic thinking.

I would definitely recommend this as one of the first books you read because there are a lot of economic fallacies out there put forth by pundits, talkshow hosts, and even some economists; this book will allow you to see whether or not their economic thinking and logic is sound.

On a personal note, this is one of the first books on economics that I read, and I absolutely loved it. While it might not be the most entertaining read, it is certainly more interesting than your standard economics textbook.

After you finish that book, I would recommend you read How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes because it explains, in a way that even a child could understand, why an economy grows. The overall concept is fairly simple, but it is vital to fully understand it before trying to understand more important concepts.

I started to make one a while back but didn't get too far. There are just too many great books to choose from.

Classics 1950-1970

What is Conservatism?

The Conservative Mind

The Road to Serfdom

The Constitution of Liberty

Ideas Have Consequences

The Quest for Community

Economics in One Lesson

Capitalism and Freedom

In Defense of Freedom


Age of Reagan 1970-1990

The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945

Modern Times

Knowledge and Decisions

A Conflict of Visions

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Roots Of American Order


Modern Must Reads 1990-Today

The Clash of Civilizations

A History of the American People

The Vision of the Annointed

Intellectuals and Society

Illiberal Reformers

Restoring the Lost Constitution

How To Be A Conservative

There's a serious argument that temperature differences have mattered. One suggestion has been made that the American South had more parasites and diseases than the North which resulted in a less intellectual culture (since childhood disease can impact intelligence).

On a radically different track, there's an argument that the African slave trade became so popular in the US because the slaves were often immune or more resistant to many of the diseases, since a lot of the new diseases, such as yellow fever and malaria had been previously active in Africa and the Europeans had less experience with them. Slavery became more prominent in the South because the disease load was worse there. This argument is discussed in the excellent book 1493 which discusses the changes in ecology and related issues after Columbus.

Steve Keen (Australian "post-Keynesian" economist) has written a book called Debunking Economics criticizing current Keynesian, Neo-classical and Austrian economics. It's a good read and I suspect it will answer a lot of your question, including many you haven't even thought of yet.

This book explains some of the how and why if you've never read it before.

You can probably find a free .pdf lying around somewhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

and

http://www.amazon.ca/1493-Uncovering-Columbus-Created-ebook/dp/B004G606EY

SO informative.

I'm a Spanish teacher to-be and I like reading about the age of discovery and spanish history.

Here are some of my favorite books about Spain, Spanish explorers, and the new world and such. The Dogs of God explains how the Inquisition came about.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MAH5OC

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001BANK3C

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004G606EY

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QGES8I

In addition to these books, you can talk about El Cid.

Native to South America, but bred to what we know as tomatoes in Mexico. If you're interested in reading more on this topic and others just like it check out 1493.

For the efficiency issue? If you read spanish I have a great book, but if not I think these might be good too:

Roadmap

Rhetoric

Debunking I made a cardinal sin. Forgive me Smith for I have sinned. I hadn't actually read this book and thought it would be an accessible version of my argument. Apparently not.


A good shorter read might be found here, I haven't revised it but they are usually really good: Standford


-
But basically the point is this: The definition of efficiency as a pareto optimal is arbitrary, in the sense that it is efficient because that's how you defined efficiency. For example, if you have 10 people (5 with two dollars each, 5 with nothing) and 10 loaves of bread, and all wanted bread, the efficient allocation of those goods could be 2 loaves of bread per person. Now is 5 people going without food efficient? Sure, if you define efficiency as pareto optimal, but that just begs the question. In broader terms, markets are efficient because by fiat they allocate goods to where there is demand (demand=$$), so they are efficient because efficiency is conceptualized pre facto as that kind of allocation.



-

edit: In case anyone who reads Spanish reads this, the book is Neoliberalismo by Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, a sociologist at El Colegio de Mexico (one of best universities in Latin America and the world). Great, short read.

My thoughts ? Traditional economics is ridiculous. A waste of time at best and seriously destructive at worst when fools pay attention to it and take it seriosuly.

start here

https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-Dethroned/dp/1848139926

I seem to remember George Reisman engaging with the chain store problem at length in his book "Capitalism" though I only used the arguments from it second-hand via Tom Woods.

That link is to a saved comment thread I partook of. The relevant bit is way down near the bottom of the page under the heading "FREE MARKET CARTELS?"

EDIT - I'll quote the most relevant bits below...

> The way I see it, this would very likely lead to a situation in which security companies collaborated to raise prices in order to make more profit.

Why do you see it that way? Which industries in which countries at which points in time look to you like cartels?

The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo in beverages and snacks are kings or queens of the hill. There are no competitors who even compare to these two giants for market share in their space. So why is there no love between them? No evidence has so far come to light of even the slightest hint of cartelisation.

Likewise in the case of The Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox in media.

Or we would have mentioned China Mobile, Vodafone and Bharti Airtel in mobile telecoms.

There is no evidence of cartelisation in any freely trading industry ever - even Standard Oil under Rockefeller doesn't qualify as a monopolist - therefore it won't happen.

In fact almost none of the so-called robber barons actually robbed anybody as Burton Folsom illuminates in his book The Myth of the Robber Barons & lectures.

For example Cornelius Vanderbilt actually defied (see 9m11s to 20m15s of the video) an existing, government-sanctioned monopoly in New Jersey/New York steamboat services and then a subsidised competitor from 1817 to 1850.

And so we move on to predatory pricing, baby. Tom DiLorenzo wrote a paper on US anti-trust laws for which he actually went and looked to see what the scary monopolists were up to in the 1880's and found nothing a neoclassical or Austrian would call monopoly in any of the 17 industries for which data were available. The data and findings are also included in a chapter of DiLorenzo's book.

On the same note DiLorenzo points out in this article that the only ones harmed in some way by the business practices of the so-called robber barons were their competitors, and it was those competitors who got the ball rolling on Anti-Trust laws by writing their congressman. He mentions one truly damning example of the impact of anti-trust regulation;


"In what is perhaps the best example of nonsensical double-talk in antitrust history, in 1944 Judge Learned Hand found Alcoa guilty of "monopolizing" the virgin ingot aluminum market by employing "superior skill and foresight" which the judge feared had "forestalled" competition by those businesses with less skill and foresight. He condemned Alcoa for being extremely adept at correctly anticipating market demand for its product and then supplying that demand, to the "exclusion" of its less efficient competitors."

And AnComs want more of this? Anyway.

To return to the Tom Woods lecture video, at 37m10s he gets onto predatory pricing in earnest and mentions that economist George Stigler calls it "embarrassing" to hear any economist say they believe in predatory pricing because nobody has been able to find a single solitary example in the real world.

Woods explains over several minutes - using George Reisman's work in Capitalism - that even a chain store does not gain financial advantage from predatory pricing over long periods and cannot raise prices after the competitors are gone. Any attempt to raise prices above that market rate creates incentives for newcomers to enter the industry again, and even at the pre-predatory market rate there will still be room for new competitors.

He also explains minimum resale price agreements between producers and retailers - Merck in pharma and WalMart in drug retail - and how they solve the problem of predatory pricing, plus how the US anti-trust law makes MRPA's illegal.

While I respect your position, I profoundly disagree. The Soviet Union was subject to international sanctions, sabotage, attacks, etc. from the beginning of the revolution. And your point about European developments in science and technology does not defeat my earlier points about how the USSR profoundly helped its people escape illiteracy and desperate poverty.

You are mistaken in attributing the economic problems of modern Russia with what the Soviet Union did to it. It was precisely as a result of the collapse of the USSR that life expectancy in Russia [dropped dramatically] (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1116380/), suicide rates spiked, alcoholism (long a problem in Russia) spiked, and the [GDP fell dramatically] (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012116/russian-economy-collapse-soviet-union.asp#ixzz584zZqmfu).

> Despite Yeltsin’s reforms, the economy performed horribly through much of the 1990s. From about 1991 to 1998 Russia lost nearly 30% of its real gross domestic product (GDP), suffered numerous bouts of inflation that decimated the savings of Russian citizens. Russians also saw their disposable incomes rapidly decline. Further, capital was leaving the country en masse, with close to $150 billion worth flowing out between 1992 and 1999.

Pensions, worker protections, trade unions, the constitutionally guaranteed right to a job, and other social services provided by those socialist countries and which had improved the quality of life for millions of people were shredded (i.e. privatized).

Lastly, there is good research pointing out that market economies in fact do not help to develop "poor" countries. One such example of this research is Ha Joon-Chang's book "Bad Samaritans "

Very interesting topic. The economies of Korea and Japan are not the neo liberal free market capitalistic states that the mainstream would like you to believe. I highly recommend reading Ha-Joon Chang’s book bad samaritans, which is basically where my knowledge of how Asian economies like Japan and Korea work https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

I’ll try to phrase the spirit of your question the best I can, thanks!

maybe you should read some books on economics:

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Trade-Doesnt-Work-Replace/dp/0578079674/

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

> the capitalist class (which brings you your iphone, reddit, a robust internet, tv, whatever the fuck else you shit on

All the technologies you claim are created by capitalism are actually the result of public sector research and government funding, lol (in fact almost all technologies are the result of public research, not private sector research): http://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

> But for capitalism, you'd be in a mud hut picking through your shit for leftovers. Capitalism is what has brought people out of extreme poverty. Not govt programs.

Wrong again!

>its the corporatist class (your beloved government getting cozie with big business) which benefited from the US govt "saving the economy."

The Capitalist class wouldn't even exist anymore were it not for the bailout! That's what you fail to understand! The "corporatist" class is just capitalism in the real world. Capitalism and government will always collude because Capitalism relies on a capitalist state to violently enforce private property claims. And what's with all this nonsense about blaming "corporatism" anyway? A minute ago you were singing the praises of Capitalism but suddenly we're corporatist not capitalist!? Which is it!?

May be interesting
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

Sometimes it feels like our entire political economy is locked into extinct ideological framing and are fighting over how to pull is to one or the other nonsensical extreme.

In the beginning, there was no American economy, only the British imperial economy. The plantations, or colonies, in North America were intended to help the British Empire in its rivalry with the other major powers of Europe. In the centuries before it unilaterally began to adopt free trade in 1846, Britain, like other European states, practiced mercantilism, a policy that treated the economy as an instrument of state power. Mercantilist policies included subsidies and preferential tax treatment for favored industries and their raw material inputs, efforts to obtain surpluses in precious metals like gold and silver and in high-value-added exports, and the conquest or founding of colonies whose inhabitants would provide markets and raw materials for the mother country. In his 1684 treatise England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade, the mercantilist theorist Thomas Mun wrote: “The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule: to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value.” The king in 1721 told Parliament that “it is evident that nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods and the importation of foreign raw material.”


No philosopher influenced the American Revolution more than the seventeenth-century English political thinker John Locke. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is practically a paraphrase of Locke’s writings on natural rights and liberty. In economics, Locke was a mercantilist, not a libertarian. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke says that “the pravity of Mankind . . . Obliges Men to enter into Society with one another, that by mutual Assistance, and joint Force, they may secure unto each other their Properties in the things that contribute to the Comfort and Happiness of this Life . . . But forasmuch as Men thus entering into Societies, . . . may nevertheless be deprived of them, either by the Rapine and Fraud of their Fellow-Citizens, or by the Hostile Violence of Foreigners; the remedy of this Evil consists in Arms, Riches, and Multitude of Citizens; the Remedy of the other in Laws.” For Locke, as for other early-modern mercantilists, military power, economic growth, and population growth were mutually reinforcing, and all three enhanced the ability of the state to defend its people in an anarchic world. In a journal entry in 1674, Locke wrote: “The chief end of trade is riches and power, which beget each other. Riches consists in plenty of moveables, that will yield a price to foreigners, and are not likely to be consumed at home, but especially in plenty of gold and silver. Power consists in numbers of men, and ability to maintain them. Trade conduces to both these by increasing your stock and your people, and they each other.”


The policy of mercantilism that Britain shared with other European empires included a division of labor in which British manufacturers sold finished products to a captive market of consumers in the American colonies, Ireland, and India, which in return exported raw materials and food to the British Isles. In 1721, the British Board of Trade told the king: “Having no manufactories of their own, their . . . situation will make them always dependent on Great Britain.” The British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who sympathized with the American colonists, summarized the policy: “These colonies were evidently founded in subservience to the commerce of Great Britain . . . On the same idea it was contrived that they should send all their products to us raw, and in their first state; and that they should take every thing from us in the last stage of manufacture.” Adam Smith made a similar observation in The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776, the same year in which the American colonies that would form the United States declared their independence: “The liberality of England, however, towards the trade of her colonies has been confined chiefly to what concerns the market for their produce, either in its rude state, or in what may be called the very first stage of manufacture. The more advanced or more refined manufactures even of the colony produce, the merchants and manufactures of Great Britain choose to reserve to themselves, and have prevailed upon the legislature to prevent their establishment in the colonies, sometimes by high duties, and sometimes by absolute prohibitions.”

Beginning in the seventeenth century, England (which became Great Britain with the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) sought to prevent the development of colonial manufacturing that might compete with British manufacturing by a variety of methods. The Navigation Acts, passed in 1651, 1660, and 1663, required all English trade to be carried in English ships with majority-English crews. All items in “enumerated” categories going to or from the American colonies had to be unloaded in Britain, taxed, and then reexported. The colonists were permitted to buy only British goods or goods that had been reexported from Britain.

The imperial government outlawed American exports that competed with British manufactured goods. For example, the 1699 Woolens Act forbade the sale of woolen cloth outside of the place where it was woven. This destroyed the Irish woolen industry and prevented the emergence of one in the American colonies. In 1732, Britain similarly destroyed an emerging beaver-hat industry in the colonies by outlawing the export of hats to other colonies or foreign countries. When Parliament lifted a ban on exports of pig iron and bar iron from the colonies in 1750, it outlawed further development of the industry. But the colonists ignored the prohibition and by 1775 the annual production of iron in the colonies, most of it for domestic consumption, was roughly the same as in Britain, despite the smaller colonial population.

Even as it banned manufactured exports from the American colonies to Britain or other parts of the empire, the imperial government encouraged the export of raw materials from the colonies to Britain. Import duties on wood and hemp from the American colonies to Britain were abolished. The colonists also received bounties, or subsidies, for exporting raw materials. Timber from the abundant forests of North America was particularly important. The purpose of regulation was to create a buyer’s market in raw materials and a seller’s market in manufactured goods for British industry.

Hindering the transfer of technology from Britain to America was another British mercantilist technique. In 1719, Britain banned the emigration of skilled workers in industries including steel, iron, brass, watchmaking, and wool. The law punished suborning, or recruitment, of skilled workers for employment abroad with fines or imprisonment. Skilled immigrants who did not return to Britain within six months of being warned by a British official faced the confiscation of their goods and property and the withdrawal of their citizenship.13 Britain followed its ban on the emigration of skilled workers with a ban on the export of wool and silk technology in 1750. In 1781 and 1785, the act was enlarged into a comprehensive ban on machinery of all kinds. The ban on skilled emigrants was repealed only in 1825, while the ban on technology exports lasted until 1842.

Evaluated in terms of its goal of fostering domestic manufacturing at the expense of other countries, Britain’s mercantilist system was a great success. Between the reign of the Tudors and the nineteenth century, Britain’s state-sponsored program of economic development turned the island nation first into a commercial and financial powerhouse and then into the first superpower of the machine age. But Britain’s imperial trade laws thwarted American manufacturers and frustrated American merchants, who frequently smuggled goods from other colonies and countries. The government also antagonized the colonists after the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War) of 1756 to 1763, when it attempted to ban white settlement of large areas of the trans-Appalachian West, in order to avert conflict with the Indians. This enraged land-hungry Anglo-American frontiersmen as well as rich American colonials like George Washington who owned vast tracts of western land. These economic conflicts, along with struggles over power and status, helped to ignite the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783.

Governments can and do invent money (in their own currency) at will. There's a rather long winded chat about it here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290. Venezuela demonstrates quite nicely what happens when they invent too much compared to how much they collect.

definitely, but the cycle of infinite growth in capitalism seems to be coming to an end. it seems pretty unlikely that developing countries now will ever reach UK standards of living

if you'd like to read more here are some good books:

The End of Growth - Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

The Limits to Growth

Debt: The First 5000 Years

This history is actually false. For a good accounting of why, see David Graeber's excellent "Debt: The First 5000 Years."

There actually isn't any evidence whatsoever that economies operated on barter initially. Barter appears to only arise in societies have had money but then do not have enough access to it for some reason. In other words, Barter is what money economies are reduced to when money becomes scarce or worthless. It appears this whole myth of Barter, then commodity money, then commodity backed money, then credit money can be traced to Adam Smith, who appears to have simply deducted back in time that it must've been barter because if you take away money, what do you have? However, we do not have any evidence of barter based economies in actual historical or anthropological studies.

Current anthropology suggests that credit came first, then money, and only barter in situations where money cannot be found. Really, read Mr. Graeber's book, it's really interesting.

He wrote a book, called "Debt, the first 5000 years". It is not a bad read, I enjoyed it. I know he did take some flack for it though.

https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Anthropology is the study of human society, their development, the cultures, the history... and economics as a discipline and its impact to how we behave is one of his interests.

LOL, no, its a good book but there are many better recommendations.

For example, if you wanted to understand the tools of state/religious oppression and its consequences in modern context I may recommend; Why Nations fail

Or if you desired to have greater understanding of the consequences of inventing money; Debt, the first 5000 years

Or if you felt that religion was cool but the idea of God was wrong you could read; Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao

Or if you wanted to read about the decline of world wide violence; The Better Angels of our Nature

Read this: "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." The model of efficiency that you mention is pretty new to the scene and pretty much a big illusion.

http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290

Thanks for the recommendation. I've got a lot of "left-leaning" books (well, some of them) on my list now that all sound interesting, and Debt is definitely a high priority because people keep recommending it.

Have you read any of his other work? Bullshit Jobs sounds really interesting but a couple reviews said the original article he wrote on the topic pretty much sums the book up in a much lower word count.

A few of the books on my to-read list in case anyone sees this and is interested:

• Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government - Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels
  
• The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics - Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
  
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History - Elizabeth Kolbert
  
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate - Naomi Klein
  
• Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years - David Graeber
  
• The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy - David Graeber
  
• Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves - Anthony Infanti
  
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World - Anand Giridharadas
  
• How Democracies Die - Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt

> this contrarian reddit attitude where mainstream economics isn't correct

LOL, my understanding of the world comes from more than reddit. I'm in my 40s now and have been studying economics for some time.

As for mainstream economics, it is largely bullshit -- little more than paid propaganda -- and I submit the colossal professional mismanagement of our economy 1980 - now as evidence of that.

Steve Keen's book is a good read about that, but there are others, including the O.G. heterodox economist himself, Henry George. Stiglitz is also very consistently good, and Michael Hudson has his moments.

>people were buying mortgages on 23% interest and paying very high interest payments. It's simply illogical.

no, it is you who doesn't understand logic here. High interest rates served to dampen price rises in the 1970s and 80s, since the vast bulk of housing is purchased with loaned money.

The 70X figure does sound preposterous, but the MJ article is from 2004 so that 70X figure has some support since that was the very teeth of the housing bubble, the one that no "mainstream economist" managed to identify at the time. Thanks to no-down, negative-amortization, interest-only, liar loans, and outright loan broker fraud, people were able to get loans they had no way of paying, and this did result in the housing market greatly outpacing incomes 2002-2005. Whether it was 70X is debatable, but:

"a big part of the two-income trap is that families have basically bid up the cost of living. Housing is a big example."

should be uncontroversial. The fundamental dynamic is that land is completely fixed in supply in any given area. We can increase housing supply only by building up (but that is subject to NIMBYism), or reducing transportation costs (but that is limited by NIMBYism and lack of capital).

Given the unbounded demand we have for land -- everyone would like a better view, bigger back yard or a vacation place somewhere -- the land market tends to take every spare dollar we make as we bid the price of it up & up.

Henry George first identified this core dynamic of our economy in his book Progress & Poverty. It's a great, if long, read.

>GDP is very flawed because quality is not part of the equation combined with the fact that it's pretty fundamentally flawed

yes, I prefer to look at wages not GDP to measure an economy. They're not making 'hedonic' adjustments to wages yet.

I was reading the 1925 UCLA catalog and this caught my eye:

http://i.imgur.com/UPPxh.png

$75/month for an apartment in West LA. Inflation measures alone says this should be $900/mo. Actual cost in West LA is $1500/mo, and houses are still even more insane. West LA is a perfect demonstration of how land is something not very well understood by mainstream economics.

This is by design, btw, the neoclassical school was founded to elide the difference between land and capital.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/coe/cofe00.htm for more on that.

Unbelievable work. One of my all time favorites.
I'd recommend checking these out as well:

Modern Macroeconomics by Brian Snowdon (Really good historical overviews of Economic thought)

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles by Jesus Huerta de Soto

Man, Economy, and State by Murry Rothbard

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (EXCELLENT if you are just beginning to study Economics)

> Quest’ultima infatti nasce proprio dalla separazione tra forza lavoro e mezzi di produzione, quindi tra produttore e proprietario, la cui identità è invece la premessa necessaria del liberalismo

la dottrina liberale prevede l'interazione tramite contratti, attraverso cui un soggetto può condividere il proprio capitale senza doverne cedere in toto la proprietà.

Si confonde forse con il mutualismo ?

> Perciò nel passaggio da un modello economico all’altro cambiano le dimensioni dello scambio: orizzontale nel caso della società individualistico-proprietaria; essenzialmente verticale nel caso dell’economia capitalistica

È impossibile avere proprietà privata e impedire l'accumulo di capitale.
Peraltro c'è tutta la questione relativamente ai prezzi su cui questi glissano pateticamente.

Prima di parlare di liberalismo e capitalismo occorrerebbe averne studiato le basi, e.g.

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

, magari usando prospettive diverse da quella marxista

This is by no means either academic or comprehensive, but it's short, fun, and just might kick-start your interest, so give it a watch. There are a couple others following up. I seriously recommend you get one of the more accessible books on economics. NPR's Planet Money has a reading list of books they recommend, and a quick peek at top results in Amazon also indicate bestsellers like Basic Economics, Economics in One Lesson, or the humorously titled and fun Naked Economics.

Any of those will do wonders. Just select whichever looks like a good time.

Or don't -- what to do with scarce resources like your own time is of course your choice. An economic choice ;)

In a business environment, lenders will very rarely take a risk like we saw with the recent financial crisis. Have you ever applied for a loan at a local credit union? They have strict standards for giving out loans because they need to mitigate risk and return a profit or at least break even. Since US banks are subsidized and bailed out , they have far less incentive to make rational bets on loans.

It is true that profit is the bottom line in a a capitalist environment, but it's erroneous to think that the only force that affects profit is direct cash inflow. There are also factors like savings (to cushion financial loss), investment (e.g. loans), advertising, and public reputation. People tend to have this vision of business where people simply grab money until their business falls apart; this doesn't reflect realistic business practices.

If an area of the economy is under-performing, it is probably doing so for a reason. "The economy" is really just an aggregate idea of how individual businesses are performing within an arbitrary area (usually geographic or political). If, for example, people are buying less salt, then the salt industry will loss jobs and/or reduce wages. This isn't a bad thing. it simply means that there is less demand for salt, or that the price is too high, and the market will balance itself.

By infusing wavering or failing industries with either taxed (i.e.: stolen) or borrowed (i.e.: debt) money, the government is artificially propping up something that the market does not realistically support. This is a waste of money. A key point to understand about economics is that there is no "superior knowledge of the market" that the government can possess. Most people think that the government is responsible for the economy, and they're right in-so-far that the government constantly regulates and props up industries. The only way to efficiently regulate an economy would be to have real-time data of everyone's wants and needs and all of their incentive and disincentives.

Magically, there is a way for this information to efficiently manage the economy: for everyone to be able to spend their money how they please.

If you're interested in a short but invaluable economics book, I recommend Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.

I concur and wanted to say this. Generating employment - should never be the only consideration before initiating a project of such magnitude. Puhlease. We must take into account the "opportunity cost" of such project as well.

read 'economics in one lesson' by Henry Hazlitt.

Given that you might not have that book available to you I am copy-pasting certain section to help you understand the vacuity of the argument they are putting forward:

>A bridge is built. If it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble, if, in short, it is even more necessary than the things for which the taxpayers would have spent their money if it had not been taxed away from them, there can be no objection. But a bridge built primarily "to provide employment" is a different kind of bridge. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. “Projects” have to be invented. [..] Those who doubt the necessity are dismissed as
obstructionists and reactionaries. [..]

>If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most. Therefore for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.

>[..] They are the jobs destroyed by the $1,000,000 taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, radio technicians, clothing workers, farmers.

>[Suppose,] The bridge exists. It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not an ugly bridge. [..] They can see the bridge. But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. [..] The same reasoning applies, of course, to every other form of public work.


This statue will NOT address any insistent public demand or solve a problem or even yield revenue unless they imposed a cost on the entry to the memorial (Ticket system). Even then it will take 3 or more decades just to recover the manufacturing cost, let alone security, maintenance cost and the opportunity cost. This project is more than likely to be glorious-looking white elephant. Maybe fishermen will like it.

The reason you don't see much debunking is because those who really understand economics (Austrian economics that is) are busy accumulating Bitcoin.
If you want to read up on it there's nice chapter on inflation in this book: Economics in one lesson - Henry Hazlitt

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504879697&sr=8-1&keywords=hazlitt+economics+in+one+lesson

It's an easy to read book I recommend everyone.

Economics in One Lesson (1946)

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

You clearly have read none of actual academic scholarship written on the war. Hollywood and your intutions is not a good guide to these events. Historical scholarship takes this aid into account when assessing the war and still concludes that Germany could not have defeated Russia. It had too much strategic depth, industrial capacity (Even without aid) and manpower. It would likely have been even bloodier than it was, but it still would have been won by the Russians. However, without the Russians it would not have been possible to defeat Germany. Period.

This is a good breakdown of the war sin the USA.

https://www.quora.com/Could-World-War-II-have-been-won-without-the-United-States

For some good starting books, go here:

https://www.amazon.com/Second-World-Wars-Global-Conflict/dp/0465066984

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197

Edit: Lol "Commie bs"? Nothing could describe me less than Communist. But I've studied the period extensively and the facts are the facts, no matter how much it upsets Americans and us Brits who've built our national identity on defeating Germany alone.

I'm not all that up to date on modern military theory since most of my knowledge is from military history and not contemporary theory (although the two are, as one would expect, highly intersectional) - I do read some modern war journals and listen to talks on modern war theory though, although relatively rarely.

I'm hardly an expert on the matter (although I'm fairly certain know enough to recognize when someone has no idea what they are talking about). I just read a lot in college, and sucked up whatever I could from the library. I also liked reading a lot of primary sources, including things like reports from field exersises/war games/intel reports/naval excercises. One time I even read the entire

One of my favourites was this book on inter-war German reforms during the Weimar era. Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is another favourite of mine (although I never got to read the whole thing, it's a fucking massive book and I never had the time so) - it's especially good if you want to see some of the economic factors of warfare and tracking them through history. Clausewitz' On War is a classic primer on military and is practically ubiquotous - but it's also old as fuck and is far more important for showing some of the roots of modern (in the broad sense of Victorian/post-Victorian, not 21st century) - treat it like you would The Wealth of Nations.

The Raise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679720197/

I found a chart in A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 by Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz. Go to page 30. It shows that from1873 to 1879 real income actually steadily rose, while prices steadily declined. Friedman and Schwartz indicate that it is probably this drop in prices that has lead contemporary observers to overstate the severity of the contraction in terms of real output. They also note that severe unemployment was avoided.

Very well, let's begin.

Since the article doesn't make a single over-arching argument, but instead tacks on bits of misconstrued information to attack Milton and establish him as a moral obscenity and a "fascist", I'm simply going to address those bits one at a time and in order.

Some points stretch the truth, others are out right lies, none are really credible in the end.

>He has been a leading collaborator of every economic official involved in the successful tear-down of the U.S. physical economy over the last 60 years: Arthur Burns, George Shultz, Paul Volcker, and Alan Green- span. He himself stayed out of government over this period but did his dirty work all the same.

So the author is suggesting that Friedman was destroying the economy through these other economic figures? Well the author doesn't bother to back up her claims here so I can only guess what events she's referring to, but at best I'm attacking a straw-man.

> Arthur Burns

Arthur Burns was the federal reserve chairman under Richard Nixon from 1970-1978. The two important things to know about him; he was a friend and teacher of Milton Friedman, and he was also responsible for the double digit inflation that occurred in the 70's. How do the two relate? First some context. At the time there were two prevailing beliefs; the first was that monetary policy had little to do with inflation (we know that's not true); the second was that price and wage control were effective tools to combat inflation. If you ever look up any Friedman videos, most of them are about inflation because it was such a widespread misconception at the time.

Before Burns's role as the chairman, him and Friedman were collaborators. They largely held the same economic views including the idea that increasing the money supply is what leads to inflation. Because of this and their history, Friedman nominated Burns to serve as chairman under Nixon. However, once Burns became chairman, his opinion of inflation changed to favor the idea of price controls. I'm unsure what changed his mind but the result was a huge expansion of the fed in addition to some price and wage control policies. "The Federal Reserve under Burns permitted very rapid monetary growth: so rapid, in fact, that double-digit inflation emerged during the decade—twice". "The disagreement led Friedman in May 1970 to send Burns a lengthy handwritten letter critical of Burns’ statements on incomes policy. The Philadelphia Inquirer (May 29, 1970) reported that Burns was shaken by the letter, and it suggested that relations between Burns and Friedman had deteriorated. The text of the letter (actually, letters, as Friedman wrote multiple times), available in both Friedman’s and Burns’ archives"[1]

It's well documented that Friedman was quite critical of Burns's policies as chairman, so if the author is trying to suggest otherwise then she clearly did not do her homework.

[1]http://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/cromer/Nelson.pdf

>George Shultz

Shultz had less of a relationship to Friedman than Burns did, the only thing they have in common is that they were both academics at Chicago. However, he does relate to the inflation of the 70's. From 1972 to 1974 Shultz served as the Secretary of the Treasury, right in the middle of Nixons new economic policy. He's attributed with participating in the wage and price controls of the time, but again by 1972 it's already established that Friedman is opposed to these policies.

> Paul Volcker

Paul Volcker was another Federal reserve Chairman, serving from 1979 to 1987. I couldn't find any explicit relationship between Volcker and Friedman, but Volcker did fight the runaway inflation of the time via tight monetary policy, as Friedman had always advocated. In 1981, Volcker tightened the Fed, raising interest rates to an unseen 19%. This led to a severe recession, but by 1982 the recession was over and so was the inflation. This initiated an economic golden age for America. The S&P 500 rose at an average annual rate of 15.7% until august 2000. The nation's Gross National Product grew substantially and the U.S. economy created more than 13 million new jobs. Of course the 80's weren't perfect, there was a stock market crash in 1987 and a short recession in 1991, but I digress.

I'm unsure how the author intended to use Paul Volcker to discredit Friedman. If anything he's been vindicated by Volcker's policy.

> Alan Greenspan

The last federal reserve chairman to serve during Friedman's lifetime, he served from 1987 to 2006. In 2006 Friedman passed away at the age of 94. This is important to note because it's on record that Friedman has approved of Greenspan's policies as fed chairman, even though his policies were mostly contrary to Friedman's beliefs. Friedman advocated for a fed tight enough to stop inflation and loose enough to prevent deflation, his overall concern being price stability. Greenspan however was able to maintain price stability while also lowering interest rates, which earned him Friedman's respect. However, this exact monetary policy has been argued as the cause of housing bubble which collapsed in 2008.

Anna Shwartz, Friedman's colleague and co-author of the Nobel prize winning A Monetary History of the U.S., said "There never would have been a subprime mortgage crisis if the Fed had been alert. This is something Alan Greenspan must answer for.”

In short, Greenspan had earned Friedman's respect for operation a loose fed while also maintaining stability. However, it's clear Friedman still supported tight fed policy in his life and it's unlikely he would have the same respect for Greenspan if he lived to see the events of 2008.

> Milton Friedman loved to popularize his economic theories as "freedom to choose." But in his academic work, and among his colleagues, there was widespread recognition that his monetarist theories were nothing less than fascist.

This is the most ironic part of the article because I'm sure most readers are unfamiliar with Friedman's academic work. They probably think the author is referring to something about capitalism since free markets are what Friedman is famously associated with. However, this is not the case. In fact, it's just the opposite. For those of you unfamiliar, Friedman won a noble prize in 1976 which is largely attributed to his work A Monetary history of the United States 1867-1960 in which he comes to a famous conclusion about the great depression.

He argues that even though market speculation caused the economic downturn, it was the failure of the federal reserve to take action which lead to the great depression. The action Friedman was referring to was to have the federal reserve pump money into the economy. Now you might be thinking "Isn't that basically Keynesian economics? Isn't this guy supposed to be all about free markets? What a hypocrite!" However, if you understand Milton Friedman's opinions in general it's not hypocritical at all. For instance, Friedman was opposed to government run education but proposed a school voucher system. He was also opposed to welfare programs but proposed a negative income tax.

Friedman was famous for second best solutions. Even though he was opposed to the current policies and even though he would have favored a free market, he was willing to compromise and come up with practical alternatives that would serve as a step in the right direction. You can find other such opinions of his on healthcare, energy, and others. The same is true for the federal reserve. He has offered academic opinions and insight on the best policies for the fed to pursue but in fact he has always been in favor of abolishing the federal reserve.

This relates back to the great depression because of the nature of how the depression started. When the stock market crashed in 1929, it led to the runs on banks. "In all, 9,000 banks failed during the decade of the 30s. It's estimated that 4,000 banks failed during the one year of 1933 alone. By 1933, depositors saw $140 billion disappear through bank failures."[2] Through out the great depression, the stock of money in the United States declined by one third. Friedman argues that the supply of dollars directly ties to the value of those dollars (this is a point that even libertarian academics such as Hayek will debate against).

Despite the academic debate, the trend proves true in the 70's where Burns's expansion of the fed caused crippling inflation, and again in the 80's where Volcker's tightening of the fed restored price stability. So why was the event of the banks' closing the federal reserve's fault? Simple, it's because the government has a monopoly on the production of currency. It's not uncommon to hear libertarians argue that even currency should be left to the free market, but I digress. Friedman is simply arguing that since the fed is the only one who could reconcile changes in the money supply that the fed alone had a responsibility to stop the money supply from decreasing so sharply. Instead FDR held a "banking holiday for three days"[2] which only worsened the problem.

The ironic part about all of this is that the author is calling Friedman a fascist for basically proposing quantitative easing, a monetary policy that is usually favored by liberals.

(continued)

umm

There's a book about the rise of containerized shipping:

https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408

Nothing about the work itself was really all that interesting - we wrote pretty bog standard fleet management, revenue management, and data warehousing software. I do basically the same things now, but for the rental car industry, there are a lot of parallels. What was interesting about this job specifically was learning the history and seeing how much work goes into managing a fleet of millions of containers, which we produced in-house for quality control purposes. It wasn't something I'd ever really thought about before.

I always enjoy learning more about stuff that's normally taken for granted - without intermodal shipping, we wouldn't have the global economy. This book was really eye opening. Malcolm McLean was one of the biggest innovators in the history of the transportation industry.

Try shipping something to China … jebus

Interestingly containerized shipping was largely invented to take advantage of all the empty ships returning from east asia to the US during the Vietnam war.

http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2

I think one of the most interesting question in history is why the romans did not have an industrial revolution. Better trade is one of the reasons given for the industrial revolution. So this paper puts the problem in even starker terms. If the med was that good at trading for that long what took so long?

The book The Box is an well written story of the container industry and it covers Malcolm McLean in detail.

I benefited from networking with students during uni:

1. The guy I met after running around the roofs and tunnels helped me get a job in the IT department.
   
   
2. Studying and working on problem sets with other students helped me learn soooooo much more
   
   
3. I got my foot in the door for my first job by talking to a grad student about a book I read about shipping containers
   
   Note that if you go into interactions with the goal of "networking", you're going to fuck it up and come off as waaaaaayyyy too transactional. Go to have interesting conversations and learn what brings people joy. Go to make acquaintances and maybe friends. Go to see who you can help (though be wary of making commitments when you're already busy).

If anyone else finds this area as fascinating as I do, I would strongly recommend Marc Levinson's excellent book: The Box. It's a well-written, comprehensive history of the shipping container and it's unbelievably massive impact on the world economy. As you might expect, everything in this video is covered in much greater depth in the book. I would bet the video was made by someone who read The Box, found it interested, and wanted to repeat what they'd just learned to a wider audience.

If you want to learn a lot about the world of containerization, read:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller/dp/0691136408/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1373386174&sr=8-3&keywords=the+box

It really goes into how the shipping container industry came about. It is a fascinating read.

> I understood it to be the ACLU’s goal to delicately balance competing rights to ensure that any infringements are narrowly tailored

What? This woman actually believes it is possible to "Narrowly Tailor" ANYTHING that happens in the public sphere?

Where do liberals get this belief that the world of human behavior CAN controlled? It's the same belief that lets them look at something as mind-numbingly complex as the economy and think that it can be centrally planned. It's the same hubris that causes them to believe that passing a law to ban a fire arm will actually cause people to not own it.

It's SO AGGRAVATING. The foundation of my conservative political views is the simple consequence of two facts:

1. Humans nature has only ever changed a five times that I am aware of (the development of Language, Writing, Agriculture, the Wheel, and the Industrial Revolution). (You might think that the last two on the list aren't actual changes to human nature, I recommend the books The Horse, The Wheel, and Language and A Farewell to Alms to defend their placement on the list). All of these have been technological changes to the capabilities of man and have only ever had behavioral changes as secondary consequences (with the possible exception of the industrial revolution if we accept the conclusions of A Farewell to Alms book on face value). None of these have been moral/ethical/spiritual changes to human nature. None of them have been instituted as changes to human nature intentionally.
   Therefore, I conclude that Human Nature can not be changed by human intention... and we shouldn't try!
   
   
2. There are systems that are unpredictable. There are basically 4 reasons this is the case.
   First, for many systems (such as the economy) sufficiently accurate and detailed information can not be collected fast enough to predict the consequences of that information before it actually happens. This feeds into Chaos Theory.
   Second, for many systems (such as the economy again) the fact that predictions are being made from data is itself altering the system... this creates a feedback loop where looking at the system alters it to the point where your tools to look at it are no longer effective.
   Third, all systems are subject to the incompleteness theorems that in non-mathematical-terms means that they always have either a flaw in their own rules, or their rules are incomplete. Connected to this, there are certain classes of problems that are literally "unsolvable"... that is they have properties that simply can not be derived except by experimentation... no amount of computation, even with perfect data can ever derive the answer, and as has recently been proven, this includes material properties of at least some things in the real material world, not just abstract math problems.
   Fourth, humans have a proven inability to figure out complex systems with multiple interlocking feedback loops leading them to attempt simple direct fixes that have unpredicted and disastrous effects well out of proportion to anticipated effects. Perhaps the most classical solution is Rent Control... a policy meant to increase housing availability that actually reduces it.
   Therefore, we should never assume that we can simply figure something out by looking at it and assuming that we're smart enough to manipulate it.
   
   Seriously, accept these two ideas, both of which are incredibly well supported by history and math, and small government conservatism is the natural result.

Then I'd suggest you read This Time is Different and The Worst Hard Time. There are quite a few parallels between the current crisis and the Great Depression.

Other people have given good links, etc. But the basic explanation (of what happens when a country defaults on it's 'sovereign debt') is two-fold:

• Creditors try to seize anything owned by the country, but outside of the country, that they can - embassies are protected, but creditors will go after state-owned companies with overseas holdings, etc
  
• Creditors won't loan any more money to the country; or if they do, they charge extreme rates
  
  
  If you're really into it, I can't recommend highly enough reading 'this time is different', which covers this topic in great depth. It's an amazing book.
  
  One other thing: for most countries, there are actually two different levels of default. the most obvious is simply reneging on debt - refusing to repay the money. The second is inflation (or put differently, printing money) - driving up the inflation enough that the debt is easy to repay. The latter obviously only works if you've borrowed in your own currency.
  
  You could look at the whole history of the euro as an (apparently failed) way to prevent the shakier European countries from being able to use the second option. Since Greece doesn't have it's own currency, they can't do this; so they have to repay the bonds in 'real' currency or default. In reality they've essentially default - it's just masked as their creditors 'voluntarily' choosing to forgive 50% of their debt.

>A move announced by central bankers on Wednesday to contain the European debt crisis resulted in euphoria in global stock markets, but it also prompted skeptics to wonder: will this time be different?

I would like to direct your attention to this book, which says that the answer is almost assuredly "no."

> Debt is not bad at all.

Not true. Debt carries interest. Lots of debt means lots of interest must be paid. Interest payments come out of the government's budget. Debt can overwhelm a government's budget. This is currently happening in countries like Greece, Spain and Ireland, but there are lots of historical examples to point to. See Rogoff and Reinhart!.

Where do we stand today? The US government has $15.9 trillion in debt. Just paying the interest on that debt requires 6% of the federal budget. As the US government takes on more debt, it must devote an increasing portion of the federal budget to paying interest. If US debt doubled and all else remained constant, the US would have to spend 12% of the federal budget on interest payments. (In reality not everything else is constant.)

> there is no clear, simple effect.

One clear and simple effect of higher debts is that more money must be spent on interest payments. These extra outlays often lead to a decrease in the social safety net. We are seeing this in Europe.

Nations with central banks can print money to pay the added interest, but that causes problems too. It may be possible to argue that on balance government debt is good but it is not possible to argue that government debt is not bad at all.

The Invisible Hook is great book about the economics of pirates.

I've only got a BA in Economics, but one of my favorite class is "Economic History of US" with A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940 as one of the required readings. It's an amazing book with plenty of graphs and statistics to support their conclusions. It explains the importance of the Erie Canal or "wealth" of a farmers in the 1800s or what does USD500 means to someone in 1800s.

edit: another interesting book called "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates" by Professor Peter T. Leeson, a Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. The book is about the economics of 18th century pirates/privateers/buccaneers, there's also a podcast episode of two Econ professor (writer & host) talking about this book.

Haha yeah and he's ruined it for the rest of us as he had the brilliant idea to propose to his fiancee on the dedication page of his book -- he got the publisher to agree to withhold that page from all the advance and proof copies so she didn't find out until the hardback was published.

I would recommend his book on the subject The Invisible Hook. It was a fantastic beach read.

http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095

but it's okay, next time will be different!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640

This book looks like a good read; should I get a kindle I'll make sure to pick it up. But what about This Time Is Different? It seems like another good book to get some relative history on economic collapse and recovery.

It's Wikipedia but I'd start reading the real estate bubble article. You can go through the individual articles and read anout the more recent ones. Research on the older crashes are usually very academic. If you're into dry material then I'd recommend This Time is Different, which talks about financial crashes in general and goes back hundreds of years.

I will just suggest you to see an inflation graphic from the 70s. Back then, the dollar was the reserve currency of the world...


There is an awesome book called "This time is different" it goes on showing several times in history when people thought that debt/easy money was ok and backfired resulting in inflation, bank runs, or sovereign defaults.

But who knows, maybe this time really is different and the US can keep printing money to pay debt without any consequences.

Freefall and The Big Short are very good. While not exactly on the 2008 crisis, reading Reinhart and Rogoff is strongly recommended.

This Time Is Different has a good 100 pages on it: https://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financial/dp/0691152640.

Also this Critical Review is more holistic: http://criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue21_23.html.

I think they did a book treatment on that as well haven't read it but my buddy who is an econometrician recommended it: https://www.amazon.com/Caused-Financial-Crisis-Jeffrey-Friedman/dp/0812221184

This Time it's Different: 8 Centuries of Financial Folly is pretty freaking awesome and is very detailed plus look at the cool cover.
book

Yeah it has, in the 19th century and during the 30s. Cool how history works like that. --source: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe.

Relevant: The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford Economics & Finance)

Since I don't know exactly what aspect of movies you are talking about, I will just give a general answer.

Movies and popular conception is mostly wrong, the wild west was not so wild. Just because there was no government, did not mean there where no laws. Different groups organised them-self in different way in order to solve the problems that normally a policy or a government would solve.

The wild west is one of the primary things studied when economics, or political scientists study what is called self enforcing contracts and anarchy. I'm not really a expert on the wild west but I have studied the topic of anarchy a bit. My main source for the wild west is this book:

• The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (http://www.amazon.com/The-Not-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543)
  
  It goes in the many topics, like mining towns, farmers, homesteading, water rights and so on. Its really a very good read.

Better source: https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Worse source: http://www.cracked.com/article_20372_5-ridiculous-myths-everyone-believes-about-wild-west.html

https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

Thankyou for the link. I appreciate it. I don't know about Medievil Iceland, but to use the American Old West a bastion of free market trade is beyond absurd. If you're interested, I can explain that comment in detail. For now, suffice it to say that the person most responsible for starting that myth is one Terry L. Anderson who is a tool of the ultra rightwing Hoover Institute that has argued for privatization of all federal lands and privatization of Indian lands as well. Nevermind the fact that he completely ignores the genocide of the Native Americans in his paper that led to his book on how tame the Old West was (for rich white people). That wiki should probably be edited for clarity.

>but my grandparents wouldve been considered lower class in the 50s and they had a refrigerator, TV and a phone.

If your grandparents had a TV in 1950 they were top 20% of US households, not lower class at all.

Refrigeration in the US was pretty common by then so forgive my 1950 figure for inaccuracy. 1940-45 seems more appropriate.

>Forget about the internet, MRIs, mobile phones, etc. Nobody had those because they werent invented.

Conveniently you "forget" all the things that make your life easier. This is a horrible trap to fall into.

Louis XIV, the sun king had 48 entrees for dinner each night. It took 500 servants to prepare all these meals. He was massively rich, the richest man in France.

You are relatively poorer than Louis XIV. You have no palace or servants or 48 entrees prepared for you each night.

What you do have are supermarkets with a selection of foods that dwarf what Louis XIV ever experienced. You can buy fresh produce and meat. Prepackaged dinners and beverages. Even have a cake made with your name on it.

You have no chefs but right now from your phone you can order a myriad number of things and have them delivered to you in under an hour, even alcohol.

You have no carriage but in under 5 minutes you can be on your way wherever you want using Uber.

You have no tailors but instead a vast selection of stores in malls with the huge selection of styles. With online shopping you don't even have to leave your home.

If you get sick, instead of leeches you get the work of hundreds of thousands of chemists and researchers providing drugs that keep you in your health.

If you don't think you're richer than Louis XIV (or your grandparents) it seems you forget what you have so you can focus on what you do not.

This little tirade is adapted from the book The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley which I encourage everyone to read.

I have made abundant thinking a part of a daily meditation. If you haven't read it then check out "The Rational Optimist." http://www.amazon.com/The-Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves/dp/0061452068

I'm not OP and can't cite specific specific evidence but there's a very good book called The Rational Optimist that talks at length about this.

An easy geopolitical read? Hmmm. I always go to history books that have a geopolitical element to them when recommending pop-geopolitics. Try Charles C. Mann's 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created or David Abernathy's The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980.

Also, almost every single thing we know of was modified by man for his own purposes. Cats, dogs, cows, pigs, chickens, apples, oranges, corn, bananas...do you think those things existed in the "wild" 1000's of years ago? No, man selectively bred them all to meet his needs.

A great book to read is 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It will blow your mind. Almost everything we consider "natural" is really just something that man transported (intentionally or unintentionally) from one place to another and proceeded to modify.

1493: Uncovering the World Columbus Created is a great text on the effects that colonialism had on global economics, politics, and environmental changes. And it's well written.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307278247?pc_redir=1404825718&robot_redir=1

Given your interests, I would suggest looking at the popular books of Charles Mann, especially _1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created_. Mann does an impressive job of covering a lot of ground in the book, and it's entirely readable.

It looks at what happened in the immediate years after the "Old" and "New" worlds started to have "exchange." It is very wide-ranging — it has lots of information on the obvious stuff (Spanish conquests in South and Central America, for example) but also plenty of unexpected things.

It also includes some pirates, some falling nations, some technological history, and even some local American history. I think it's too early for Lewis and Clark but there are plenty of explorers and other folk in there.

The way I think about learning history is this: you need to develop a "skeleton" understanding of the major trends and events, and really grok those. Once you have that sensibility, it is easy to drape additional details, sub-stories, and narratives onto that skeleton, and you start to see how everything is connected, everything fits together. A book like Mann's is a fun way to develop that skeleton for the late-15th through even the 19th- and some 20th-century topics, and once you have that, it'll be easier to figure out what the next step should be.

(Plus, it's a fun read!)

I enjoyed "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, and am currently loving "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. Behavioral Economics is fascinating.

Sometimes. We can also be much smarter in a group than individually. Check out this book. The Wisdom of Crowds https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385721706/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_tWXrDbBFE4PF0

And this is more than groups coming together to discuss and bounce ideas off of each other (which is of course a valid experience as well). It includes things like how when people guess how many gumballs are in a jar the average of every guess tends to be more accurate than any individual guess.

So yes, you're right but only partially. Together we can do both horrible and amazing things.

Check this book. A very interesting read... its basic message is that there exists something like the wisdom of the crowd, but that some conditions have to be met (Diversity of opinion, decentralization, independence and a good opinion aggregation method), which is not always the case. For example, opinion leaders may skew the debate in some direction because of their influence on others opinions.

> Edit: Basically, what would get you to group invest?

1. A group of investors; not gamblers.
   
2. Either long term investors or DayTraders or Swing Traders or Algo Traders; but one group for each category, no mix & match
   
3. A venue where people would share their trades before they execute them, as well as their portfolio. No need to give proof, trust is key
   
4. People sharing what they do and everyone else is free to get inspired. No wishy-washy or people short on funds and long on overbloated egoes only looking to troll.
   
   This idea is not new, it is based on The Wisdom of Crowds (great book), the key is to have like minded people, serious, and with the same outcome (sharing of info, not trolling); and that's something that's missing on Reddit as we know it.
   

Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks - Mark Buchanan

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles - Robin Baker

Motley Crue: The Dirt - Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band - Neil Strauss

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell

The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer

The Climb - Anatoli Boukreev

Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner - Dean Karnazes

I get what you mean but there is potential though.

https://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706?tag=w050b-20

>Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

It's not always "right" but overall mostly not "wrong".

Start with this: Basic Economics 4th Ed: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

Actually the way it works out is actually fair and gives you freedom, something socialism and communism doesn’t give you.

It is fair because if you work hard and are successful then you will reap the rewards. If you are a bad businessman then you will fail, a good one will succeed.

You also have the freedom to choose whatever you want. If you want to be a boss you can, if you want to work for someone you can, if you want to be lazy and not work then you can be you just won’t have any money.

Socialism isn’t freedom. If you work hard you will still make the same amount. So guess what happens? People don’t work as hard, they don’t invent things like they do in a capitalist society because they don’t have an incentive to motivate them.


You make good choices then you get rewarded, if make bad ones then you suffer as you should.

You should really read a book on economics, you will be very surprised about how much you don’t know and how much people on tv and in Congress are either economically illiterate or are purposely lying about economics/ either way it’s not good.

Read this book and open your eyes. Link is below:

link

Or more accurately, this.

It's a pretty large subject, roughly split into two parts: microeconomics (looking at the market for a single type of product, important for running a business) and macroeconomics (looking at the entire economy as a whole, important for analyzing things like taxes, government spending, imports/exports, outsourcing, etc). For voting you mainly want to learn macro, but it depends on core concepts from micro ("supply and demand" is the phrase you will hear many times, and it's important to learn exactly what these are). I'd recommend Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell. This book is often used in university economics courses for non-majors (the main difference being that economics majors have to do a lot of math that most of us don't need if we just want to understand the concepts).

But our oil IS priced differently. And the price of oil is not "global". It would seem you lack understanding of how prices work. Is the price of bread global? Certainly, every country consumes some amount of bread. How much bread is produced in the U.S. and what cost? How about Singapore? It's not about "having enough oil", which I disagree with, by the way. But if we can produce oil and other energy here cheaply, then the "global" price becomes irrelevant for American consumers and American industry. If the "global" price of bringing oil to the U.S. is $140/barrel, but I can purchase the same amount of oil/energy LOCALLY for $120/barrel, then I will.

You need to discard this notion of a "global" price. Prices are not determined by the "globe". Prices are determined by the people willing to buy the particular good.

I strongly suggest a little reading on the subject.

How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes is a really good primer for macroeconomics and will set you on the right path.

Economics in One Lesson is a great book that will give you a solid theoretical foundation and perspective.

I also recommend anything by Thomas Sowell, such as Basic Economics or Applied Economics.

Dude, if you're going to even try to engage in a discussion about economics, I'd suggest you actually read an economics text book first so that you can at least try to sound like you know what you're talking about.

Here's one.

> Debt usually has interest attached to it as it is considered as a loan, which needs to be paid back

This part is spot on.

> Credit is simply issuing value without expecting it to be returned with interest

This part isn't. When we talk about credit we typically are using it in one of three different ways.

1. We can mean it in the sense of "creditworthiness." When people are talking about having a good credit score, it means that the credit agencies have calculated that you are a "good" credit risk, i.e. that you will pay back the money that you borrow. (I'm assuming from your British English ("labour" vs "labor") spelling and the fact that you mentioned it was getting late while it was mid afternoon for me that you are somewhere in Europe, am I correct? If so, this may not apply to you, as I'm not sure how countries other than the US do these things.)
   
   
2. Buying things "on credit", which is just another way of saying "I'm using borrowed money to pay." It would be assumed that you will be charged interest and be expected to pay it back.
   
   
3. In a more technical accounting sense. When you incur a liability that you need to pay back, under standard dual-entry accounting, you would debit an asset account and credit a liability account. For instance, if you buy a $1,000 computer and pay with a Visa credit card, you would debit your "Electronic Hardware Asset" account the $1,000 value of the computer, and then you would offset that debit by crediting your "Visa Liability Account" the $1,000 that you now owe on it. Welcome to the world of accounting! Words don't make a whole lot of sense here, or at least they don't correspond well with their common sense meanings.
   
   > This is a very complex topic and you have made it slightly less complex for me..
   
   The whole thing is incredibly complex, and you're thought process has brought you into the convoluted conjunction that is Macro-Economics, Game Theory, and Financial Markets.
   
   If you'll accept a bit of unsolicited advice, I would really recommend reading:
   
   The Ascent of Money by Niall Fergusson. [Amazon Link] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Ascent-Money-Financial-History/dp/0718194004/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382204864&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Ascent+of+Money). It's not super technical, and overgeneralizes a bit, but I think putting all of the different aspects the currency system into a historical context might help you pin what all is going on, and give you a little clearer picture of how all of the moving parts fit together.
   
   Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. [Amazon Link] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Basic-Economics-4th-Edition-Economy/dp/0465022529/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382205024&sr=8-1&keywords=Basic+Economics+sowell). It's a bit dry, but is still a pretty easy non-technical introduction. Sowell is also a little over the top with his "Gung-Ho Free Market Fuck Yeah!" mentality, but it's probably the best introductory text that I know of that a thoughtful person could get themselves through without any outside guidance.
   
   (I hope this doesn't come across as condescending, I certainly don't mean it be)

Lots of great recommendations in this thread; I've added a few to my reading list. Here are my suggestions (copied from a previous thread):

• How to Win Friends and Influence People - Everyone with a mother should practice this.
  
• Tao Te Ching (S. Mitchell translation)
  
• Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy - I never cared about economics until after I was done with school, and didn't remember anything from university class. This helped explain a lot of common fallacies many people make.
  
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets - As Taleb says in the beginning of the book, anyone from any profession could have written this book, but a financial background makes this much more interesting. Anyone interested in science and what we can learn from the world of past experience should read this. This led to the next book:
  
• How to Live: A Life of Montaigne - A biography of Montaigne, a great skeptic, always curious, interested in what it means to be human. I found I could relate a great deal with the man, as many others have in different ways. The dust-jacket description made it sound like a boring historical overview, but I think the book flowed pretty well and was always interesting.
  
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Anyone that ever creates a slideshow, or attempts to represent data visually should read this book. More than once. I'd say it changed my life.
  
  And, the following two are a look into the lives of two great men that lived in the 20th century; both offer many points worth emulating.
  
  
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
  
• The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer (once available in full on PBS website, seems not to be the case now ...)

A better (contemporary and with more hindsight) battle would be Sowell vs Piketty.

I periodically seek out opposing views to challenge my confirmation bias. But when the topic is economics and the source is Reddit, the result generally involves reading a heap of full retard. I could get that more easily by reading Krugman. These people would do well to contemplate Economics in One Lesson in that they're completely failing to consider the unintended consequences of the policies they advocate.

Not everything I'm going to list is really libertarian per se but I think they do give important context for the libertarian/broader right wing movement

Economics in One Lesson. It's repetitive but gets the point across

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a philosophical perspective

IThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's difficult to call Heinlein a libertarian but this book definitely is. Also where the 'rational' part of my flair comes from!

There is No Alternative. I'm not sure how many people would consider Thatcher a libertarian but she's an important part of the history of the modern struggle against socialism that I think is overlooked in the United States

The Fatal Conceit. One of Hayek's must read works. A much shorter one that is I think just as important, Why I Am Not a Conservative

Atlas Shrugged. I'm not saying it's a good book or that you don't know of it but it's worth thumbing through just to see what all the hubbub's about. Prepare yourself for a latent S&M fetish.

Capitalism and Freedom. Maybe reading this will help you figure out why Naomi Klein seems to hate Friedman so much. Also very good and much more digestible is his television series Free to Choose and the similarly titled book

The Communist Manifesto. Provides good context. And maybe a chuckle.

Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

May I recommend Henry Hazlitt's excellent Economics in One Lesson? It's a short, timeless explanation of the basics.

You can find it here.

> But we already have a system where some people benefit without contributing. Why does it matter where they were born? I don't see why giving a Mexican immigrant money is worse than giving some guy born in Kentucky money.

The left likes to blame all white people for slavery. Many of these people are first or second generation immigrants. Still, these people and their families contributed to the tax codes (Social Security/Medicare/FederalStateCity Income tax). They contributed. This would be like rowing a boat with 10 people across the Atlantic and picking up 5 or 6 people who just want to jump on. The don't really row or care to, but everyone who does row should feel guilty about the people not rowing.

And let's look at this... We have an entire welfare system that punishes everyone via taxes to support people who can't provide for themselves vs. a cake. Look how far the muck of leftist, emotional insanity has taken us. Read Henry Hazlitt. You can do it in a day.

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

Everyone recommends this one as a starting point. It's even listed on the sidebar (though the link appears to be down).

We fundamentally disagree.

I just finished reading this book. Check it out. It's simple.

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

Just leaving this here for those interested in this thesis:

https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-S/dp/0061452068

And this:

https://www.amazon.com/Skeptical-Environmentalist-Measuring-State-World/dp/0521010683

I prefer Matt Ridley's view. The world is rapidly getting better at a quicker pace by virtually any metric.

An interesting counterbalance is The Rational Optimist. The world is using more resources, but GDP and energy seem to be decoupling, clean energy sources are starting to take off, and technology keeps moving on. If we get the incentives right (revenue neutral carbon tax ideally, also smart city policies) there isn't any real reason that we have to be doomed to a resource collapse.

As you mention, energy prices have recently collapsed and may stay depressed for a while. It reminds me about the Population Bomb that never really happened.

No worrys, everything is coming together

It is actually pretty mainstream. It is a great book on trade and human development, but it touches on the topic. Its a great read. https://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-S/dp/0061452068

Another great thought-provoker

http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolves-P-S/dp/0061452068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416175069&sr=8-1&keywords=Rational+optimist

While we're making book recommendations, you should try this, this, or this. Or maybe these, or this, or hell, this if my summary of the current situation of the state as universal malefactor and the alternatives as looking better every day are unconvincing to you.

As for some misguided belief that the people will "rise up" in some faux revolution with onward marching and people's councils and all that kind of jazz; not at all, generally speaking, people are stupid. For example those that think that it's a paranoid fantasy the state operates in its own interests first despite the cacophony of evidence supporting this fact all over the world and the simple fact that it has always been so. But people also don't like being fucked over, and they're not stupid enough that they won't take whatever actions are necessary to directly counteract being fucked over as those actions become clearer and easier for them to take.

My saying that the question was stupid was not productive. I'll grant you that.

​

But how you pose the question can change people's perception of it. Were you trying to say "genocide, what's the big deal?". Because that's how you question (especially the last sentence) read to me. Or were you saying something like "it seems like humans are destroying the planet and there is no hope of saving it, so why bother?" If that was what you meant it really didn't land. Also, if you want a book about how there is progress and not everything is terrible, then I would recommend The Rational Optimist.

Amen

People just like to complain about the growing income gap (between rich and poor) or the rape culture or the growth in violence when in fact all statistics show that the world is a much better place now than it was 50 years ago: in these times being poor meant not having a fridge and not eating every day. Today it's having a smartphone that's not an iphone. Rape occurrences got halved over the last 20y and litteracy rates have gone up significantly in places where it was really low.

Just read The Rational Optimist which shows how the world is so much better than it used to, and humans have always found ways to avoid the catastrophy that doomsayers were announcing.

As you said in your other comment, the government is not (I maintain that it currently is, but shouldn't be) a business, so it shouldn't be investing in anything besides national defense and maybe some research. We shouldn't be subsidizing green energy any more than we should be subsidizing oil (which we do).

I'm okay with a temporary solution to fix the problem that government subsidies and market interference has caused, but once it's resolved, the government should leave the market alone. For example, a doctor doesn't keep a patient on medication forever after a surgery, but only until the patient is healed.

I could also consider bounties from the government for solving ecological problems, such as cleaning up atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, cleaning up oil spills, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions through science (e.g. using seaweed to reduce methane production in cattle).

Perhaps in just an optimist (great book BTW), but I honestly think that at can come up with innovative solutions that don't require government intervention.

I could also come up with a number of online articles about the woes of ethanol, but I find a really good overview and argument against ethanol in "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley

You make excellent points. In-group boundaries can indeed align with cultural experience, and we cannot discount the importance of past experiences - especially for groups that have been the victims of persecution, for example.

However, I think it is a testament to the larger project of human civilization that we can transcend our own personal experiences and use a more abstract form of compassion and empathy to inform policy, law, planning, and our collective efforts to structure and govern society. For example, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust following World War II, the international Jewish community made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of the humanist project worldwide. If ever there were a time when an in-group might have justification to demonize out-groups as "the enemy" that was it. And yet a broader, more abstract compassion arose as a guiding ideal. So I don't agree that hardship and persecution necessarily lends itself to a cynical view of "foolish empathy" as you phrased it.

Having said that, there is undoubtedly a tension among values like self-preservation and magnanimity, and I would never suggest that simply expanding one's sphere of empathy and the broadening of how an individual defines his or her self-interest flatly negates the reality of these types of tension. But these finer details are not an area for speculation or conjecture. Instead, this is a place where science can get to work trying to reveal what is actually going on. Jonathan Heidt has done some interesting cross-cultural research on political orientation, and so I would start by looking at his work.

As for the question of how cultures change with shifting economic, environmental, and geopolitical circumstances, there is a large and growing scientific literature that is trying to us give some answers. The disciplines where I have seen the most work along these lines are cultural anthropology and geography. There are some wonderful popular books on these topics, and I would recommend Charles C. Mann's 1491 and 1493 in particular.

Have you read 1491 and 1493?

A lot of good stuff on the latest archaelogical findings and theories. There is new evidence that Amazonian Indians weren't all hunter gatherers, that they actual practiced a tree based agriculture and left behind mounds and other physical evidence of some kind of civilization.

Charles Mann, the author, is just summing up and/or popularizing current trends in archaelogical thought, but I learned some stunning things that went against what is taught in the schools.

What's your source?

Here's mine: http://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247

It's a pretty good survey of the current state of knowledge on the subject and is intended for the non-technical reader.

>And all that were conquistadores acted as Spanish in behalf of the Spanish crown. No Basque conquest of any place or people attested histotically.

I would have thought this went without saying.

The trend is that crops that could not grow in certain latitudes due to colder climates can now tolerate the slightly warmer temperatures. A good example of this is french grapes that traditionally could not grow in England can now do so.

So we can reasonably expect any plant that used to only grow in, say, Southern California or Texas to now tolerate Oregon and Iowa. In the future, this may move even further north.

I should also mention that the same effect is occurring in the southern hemisphere, so weather patterns typical in the northern parts of Argentina are shifting south toward the higher latitudes.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the recent IPCC report stated that we have already experienced 1 full degree of warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere between 2030 and 2050 we will gain another half degree of warming. There's a chance that we might be able to hold it there if we go 100% carbon neutral by 2050, but otherwise the world will continue to warm to 2C by 2100.

My point is that the "5*C world" will not happen in our lifetimes. That's not to say we shouldn't care about the future, but rather we can't make a reasonable prediction about what the world will be 500 years from now.

Coming back to your question, where will agriculture be possible with 2 degree of warming? I believe that agriculture will continue to be possible in most places, as long as we do not exhaust the soil of nutrients or ruin it with poor irrigation practices. The crops we plant might change though - corn uses a tremendous amount of nutrients despite only producing a couple of cobs. A more calorie/nutrient dense crop might be beans, rice, etc. but that's depends on politics and economics more than anything else. There's a reason why Iowa is known for it's endless fields of corn instead of wheat or lettuce.

Likewise, modern Americans eats an enormous amount of meat without really paying for the environmental cost of it. I'm not advocating for veganism, but having a hulking chunk of steak every night isn't sustainable across billions of people.

I recommend you read a couple of books about sustainable agriculture - it's a fascinating subject and it may answer a lot of your questions. Some of my favorites include:

• The Third Plate
  
• 1491
  
• 1493
  
• The Wizard and the Prophet (I'm reading this one right now but it's very enlightening).
  
  

A good book that would probably answer a lot of your questions.

https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247

> white men couldn't do field work in hotter regions.

No - at least in the American South, it was malaria resistance. Africans had it, whites didn't. Source: 1493.

Incorrect. Read The Wisdom of Crowds.

https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706

Evaluating the merits of a work of art and/or gameplay experience, as well as its worth in the marketplace is not a 'basic' task, it's a monumental one in which peoples' biases and preferences will surely factor in. And larger numbers of people attempting to do so will almost always end up with a better result than smaller numbers of people.

So... http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706 ?

My girlfriend recently got her masters degree in sociology, and her thesis was about different types of polls and how they affect outcomes. It turns out that the differences between internet, written (snailmail) and telephone polls is not just slight, it's enormous. Of course, it's because you're tapping into different demographics. Remember who everbody in the internets was full of disbelief when noone actually voted for Ron Paul?

A better predictor for elections is probably a prediction market ('the wisdom of crowds' is an interesting read). Take a look at intrade. Over 60% of the 'investors' there predicts a win for Obama. Not only that, it seems that the Democrats were set for a win from the start, regardless of Clinton or Obama, although the grap has widened.

This concept is known and has been proven over and over again.

See;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU

https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/189-5891326-0992054

> Also you have the problem of proving you're in debt at a cryptographic decentralised level. I'm pretty sure this is impossible?

The "magic of wisdom of crowds" is that it is not manipulated, because by nature people are manipulative http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706

I used to blindly believe that people in groups are essentially stupid, until I read the wisdom of crowds. I now think that there are times when they can indeed be stupid (moblike mentality), but there are many times when the crowd can be remarkably right.

The wisdom of Crowds.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373830676&sr=8-1&keywords=the+wisdom+of+crowds

Does anyone know if Average Draft Position outscored the Fantasy Pros 'expert' ratings for last year's draft?

I love this topic.

I highly suggest reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. He goes deep into the special abilities of crowds, what factors are needed to make a "smart crowd", the different types of problems crowds can solve, and the limitations of crowds.

Also highly recommend The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon. It was published in 1896 and has a much more pessimistic view of the crowd, which I attribute to the lack of technology at the time.

That's because of The Wisdom of Crowds

Consensus based systems have already been proven to be superior to expert based systems. Since there is no reliable way to pick an expert, and even if picked, the expert will not have access to all available information or knowledge.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706

>The problem is, the "market" doesn't do a good job deciding what people should earn.

I wouldn't agree with that statement. Probably the only time the "market" doesn't have a say in determining wages is in the case of executives who essentially determine their own pay. That's what comes to mind (I'm assuming) for most people when they think of "overpaid" workers. Point being, in that case, the market doesn't directly decide the pay of those who have the most exorbitant salaries. It's not a failure of the market. If anything, it's the lack of competition present due to government intervention...

>My point is this: If the country locked down wages in a tiered system, the market would still have to be based on demand

If the country is locking down wages, it's not allowing the market (including demand) to work as it should. It will cause a lot of problems. Examples of potential problems would be massive shortages of labor in some places and large surpluses (read: unemployment) in other areas. It would hurt local businesses in some areas and benefit them in other areas. The list could go on, but I think the point has been made.

>And if the workers' location was a non-issue, ALL states could develop really healthy and lucrative job markets.

It's not the workers' location that matters as much as the economic environment that they live in. Arguably the healthiest economy in the US today is found in North Dakota (3.8% unemployment and $1 billion budget surplus), which is about as far from Wall Street and the Silicon Valley as you can get.

Just wondering, how much exposure to economics do you have? A lot of the topics you're addressing have already been addressed by economists. If you're interested in seeing their take on things, I would recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, as a general introduction to the subject. Given what you've expressed thus far, I'm sure you'd enjoy seeing what he has to say.

here ya go:

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-4th-Ed-Economy/dp/0465022529

a preview:

http://www.altfeldinc.com/pdfs/BASICECONOMICS.pdf

off topic, but you might want to browse the old Krugman Truth Squad archives. Mr. Nobel Prize winner's newspaper columns were wrong on basic facts a shockingly high percentage of the time:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/206253/meet-krugman-truth-squad/donald-luskin#

A free market is the most efficient way to distribute scarce resources. Economics if the study of how this distribution of scarce resources happens.

Your ideals being well meaning are not rooted in reality. As of right now we don't have unlimited power sources, or even super efficient ones. We are coming to the point at which the basic necessities for humans can be provided with little effort, 3d built homes, food in abundance via advanced farming techniques (without oil though?), ubiquitous transportation thanks to computerized transport, an abundance of energy via new nuclear/solar/wind technologies. These will make the basic human life easy, but if you want to enjoy the scarcer resources, the nice property, the awesome vacations, the trip to Mars, then you will need to work and be more productive than the next guy. It is Basic Economics!

Since you like sci-fi, read about how this society deals with scarcity, this is the model we are moving towards.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-4th-Ed-Economy/dp/0465022529/ref=dp_ob_image_bk

> Could you stop with the ad hominem?

Can you please stop using ad hominem incorrectly? "means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments. When used inappropriately, it is a fallacy in which a claim or argument is dismissed on the basis of some irrelevant fact or supposition about the author or the person being criticized."

I'm not attacking your character, I called your comparison ignorant, because it is.

> You've missed the point -- the point is that the market can't tell if the egg is broken or not; and behaves the same way for those twenty years until it is put to use (or not in the case of the broken egg).

I didn't miss your point at all. Your thought "experiment" is famously well known as Schrödinger's cat. The thing is, you can't use this paradox in economics. "The problem with Schrödinger's thought experiment is that the scientist doing it has to open up the box to see how the cat has fared. But the act of looking destroys the superposition. The quantum states “decohere” or collapse into one classical state or the other. In other words, whenever you actually look in the box, the cat is always either dead or alive."

You can't assume that simply because a bitcoin is not being used that it will never be used again. There has to be a consensus and way to prove to 100% of a degree that it will never be used again before it truly lowers supply.

> The act of holding is one of NOT spending. And as you seem happy with the idea that spending alters things, then so too, by definition does not spending.

Now, I'll agree that what I'm about to say is debatable, but inflation exists to encourage spending. Without it it's likely economies would collapse. Bottom line, not spending hurts instead of helps.

> Everyone does not do that though. And as I explicitly said -- that wasn't what I was advocating.

This is called Tragedy of the Commons - "an economics theory by Garrett Hardin, individuals acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, behave contrary to the whole group's long-term best interests by depleting some common resource."

This is what I'm trying to give light to. Although you may think differently, your actions are in fact contrary to the whole group's long-term best interest.

> What on earth do you think "supply" means? You do understand that supply is a fluid thing, when we talk about supply and demand it is "supply at a particular price".

You are completely crossing supply with market cap. Price is completely irrelevant to supply when trying to analyze overall supply. And what price? Price compared to dollars? To gold? To tulips? It's completely arbitrary.

> I might be willing to sell my services at $100 an hour but not at $10 an hour -- hence, when I withhold my services at $10 an hour, the total supply of that service in the economy at that time is lowered.

This is called Fair market value. You don't set this, the market does. And if you think you do, well, then you're going to go out of business FAST!


> If I am a baker, and I choose not to bake some loaves does that not lower supply?

No, if it never existed in the first place it has no impact on the supply. A thought doesn't affect supply.


>If I am a baker and I choose to bake those loaves, but then throw them away, how is that any different from my not having baked them at all? Supply is lowered.

When you bake them, supply increases, when you throw them away, supply decreases. You may end up with the same total supply as there would have been if you had not baked them at all, but nonetheless, you still affected total supply during the time they existed. How do you not get this??

I don't mean to be argumentative, but I'm done trying to teach Economics 101 to you. None of your arguments have any backing and are completely suggestive. Do yourself a favor and please look at the links hyperlinked in this post and read this book. It will help you greatly.

Actual Conservative here. You seem to know nothing of our ideas other than strawmen put forth from lefist echo chambers (like this very sub).

Here is a good start for you if you actually want to have a basic understanding.

I cringe every time I say this because, being married and gay myself, the author has some fairly horrific social beliefs on equality for people like me. If you read his other writings (he's prolific) please do not attribute them to me or think I support them in any way. The guy would be perfectly happy to rip my family apart and have us enjoy limited protections under the law.

That said, I believe in being impartial and judging people by the quality of their work. Professionally, he wrote what is simply the best introductory topic for the layperson who wants a real-world understanding of the fundamental laws of economics and how they influence day-to-day life. It's called Basic Economics by economist Thomas Sowell. It is the book I gave members of my own family when they reached adulthood and took an interest in what I do.

Read it. It will be one of the few things that can pay dividends for the rest of your life. You'll end up with at least a freshman or sophomore level understanding of college economics in terms of the big ideas; the things that matter. Just as importantly, you'll know enough to be able to research topics that interest you further and that seem counterintuitive (e.g., understanding why economists hate rent control because it always leads to worse housing conditions and out-of-control housing costs for the poor and working class due to manipulation in the supply/demand curve.). It's far easier to get through than a textbook and will give you a lot to consider.

As for tax policy, not off the top of my head. I think the big thing is to get the fundamental economic ideas right because then you can at least understand how your stated goals relate to tax policy which involve, to some degree, moral decisions about fairness. When you get into tax policy, it's more about numbers; learning to analyze the data yourself to decide whether you are being manipulated.

>It's doesn't steal money from me.

This has been discussed many times on this sub. The definition of steal we are using is.

Steal: to take without asking for permission.

The State did not ask for your permission before it took your taxes. The definition of steal that you might have been using is.

"to take with the intention of using the stolen goods to help others"

Are you really OK with this definition of steal? If I'm hungry and I stop you on the street and take your wallet because it's for a "good cause to help the hungry" is this really OK?

You could be thinking "but The State doesn't actually physically threaten people for taxes". You know that isn't true though already. There are people in Prison for not paying taxes.

>Only you and a small number of people with your outlook think you're being stolen from.

Only a small number of people believed in the merits of a Constitutional Republic at one point too. Obviously it doesn't matter how many people believe something. That's an appeal to authority, not a very productive argument.

>The money we give over as taxes into a collective pool is used to support people who are in vulnerable situations.

All of the evidence that I've seen suggests that Welfare programs make the poor worse off not better. I highly recommend reading this book on the issue.

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529/ref=cm_lmf_tit_3

You also understand that your tax money is used to murder and cage innocent people right? Do you believe that people should be put in prison for victimless crimes? Do you believe your money should be used to bomb thousands of people in foreign lands?

> Lol I like how you cherry pick. You totally avoided the bulk of my last comment

Lol, I like how you stand up straw men... like the bulk of your last comment which I ignored because it was irrelevant. I also like how you use "lol" as an argument... just pretend your debate opponent is missing some painfully obvious point which everyone is aware of... and you don't have to argue whatever that imaginary point was.

The bulk of your comment started with this:

> So yes we’re talking about the disadvantaged. You’re pretending it doesn’t exist and you need me to spoon feed you instances where the wealthy take advantage....." yadda, yadda, yadda.

I never said there weren't people who are disadvantaged. I never said that rich people never take advantage of others. The whole bit is irrelevant and I ignored it because it didn't pose a question and contained nothing of substance with which I really disagree... just some huffing about how exhausting you find it that someone you're debating with doesn't just agree with you.

But your position is NOT that the rich sometimes take advantage of people but that they are only be rich because they take advantage of people. It's not that I "can't say anything bad about rich people" but that I'm saying there's nothing bad with being rich in-and-of itself... a rich person has to have done something bad for me to condemn them, for you it's just enough that they are rich and you assume, wrongly, that they must have done something bad to be so rich.

That is the premise which I'm contesting. I'm not bothering to argue with you about stuff on which we already agree, that rich people can be bad people and do bad things.

> Anyway have you actually read anything about income inequality? Can you link please?

Sure, here, here, really any decent economics textbook not written by by a marxist would suffice.

Right here: https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465022529

Reactionary Thought

Chartism – Thomas Carlyle
Latter-Day Pamphlets – Thomas Carlyle

The Bow of Ulysses – James Anthony Froude
Popular Government – Henry Summers Maine

Shooting Niagara – Carlyle
The Occasional Discourse – Carlyle
On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History – Carlyle

The Handbook of Traditional Living – Raido
Men Among the Ruins – Julius Evola
Ride the Tiger – Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World – Julius Evola

Reflections of a Russian Statesman – Konstantin Pobedonostsev
Popular Government – Henry Maine
Patriarcha (the Natural Power of Kings) – Sir Robert Filmer
Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler
Hour of Decision – Oswald Spengler
On Power – Jouvenel
Against Democracy and Equality – Tomislav Sunic
New Culture, New Right – Michael O’Meara
Why We Fight – Guillaume Faye
The Rising Tide of Color – Lothrop Stoddard
Liberty or Equality – Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Democracy: The God that Failed – Hans-Hermann Hoppe

****

Economics

Economics in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt
Basic Economics – Thomas Sowell
That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen – Frederic Bastiat***
Man, Economy, and State – Murray Rothbard
Human Action – Ludwig von Mises

****

​

>controlling the prices helps keep farmers afloat by maintaining market stability.

I disagree

And the overall financial stability of rich farmers is of less concern to me than poor folk who cannot afford to feed their kids without food stamps.

Jesus fucking Christ. Do yourself and the rest of us a favor and get yourself one of these.

Not at all. There's an epidemic of economic ignorance which is clearly apparent when watching Maher or Oliver while witnessing a resurgence of socialism as a plausible solution. "If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists." -F.A. Hayek

Here's an excellent place to start learning, if anyone is interested in a very readable, logical and engaging lesson in basic economics..

Happy to consider another source on economics if you have any to offer.

Source

Economics in One Lesson is a great book on economics.


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Economics-One-Lesson-H-Hazlitt/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509531115&sr=1-3&keywords=Economics+in+One+Lesson

PLEASE read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

> greater good, measure it, achieve it, this is why I say reddit is a word splashing place, to provide evidence for all them questions I would literally need weeks to back everything up and that's after I've tried to answer the questions.

Those were rhetorical questions. They have no good answers. That's the point. I'm trying to point out that you're using incredibly vague language that carries almost zero meaning.

> By working towards scrapping the current monetary system to try and focus on kaizen aka star treks earth ethos (knowledge is value)

I think you should go read a basic economics book. It might really open your eyes. Try this---it's only ~200 pages.

Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt

this is a tremendous book for beginners and explains the concepts very well.



Alternatively, if you want a hard copy, it's only $9.

I understand your point. Fear is a dangerous emotion. It has driven many nations to tyranny, which is why education is so important.

If you get some time take a look at Economics in One Lesson:

http://jim.com/econ/

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253335488&sr=8-1

I agree this is horrendous idea. I would recommend you read through Austrian economics. Here's a good one: http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

Also, sitting on capital is not a bad thing. It is synonymous with a person sitting on a pile of cash or in a bank. In any sense that is called Savings -- something we need more of nowadays.

Dang it, I forgot to tell you:
Read this short and easy economics book, Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt.

It is a quick read, and makes it abundantly clear what the effects of inflation are.

Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, by Mises

Human Actiom, by Mises

The Theory of Money and Credit, by Mises

The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, by Mises

The Road to Serfdom, by F.A Hayek

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, by F.A Hayek



Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt

‪No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, by Lysander Spooner

If anything, you should read this because it is on topic with transportation.

If your coming from the left I recommend In Defense of Global Capitalism

If your coming from the right maybe For a New Liberty (free online) or Rollback


Other classics:


Anarchy, State, and Utopia -Academic Philosophy, tough read

Economics in One Lesson - Econ, easy read

Man, Economy and State (also free) - Econ, tough read

As for critics of Libertarianism there are tons of them, from idiots like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore to well respected economists. I would check out someone like Amartya Sen. If you read about criticisms of the free market or capitalism for the love of god read someone who is actually criticizing capitalism and not corporatism.

From Ron Paul's review of Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson on Amazon (apparently Amazon believes he's a Senator...):

> "I strongly recommend that every American acquire some basic knowledge of economics, monetary policy, and the intersection of politics with the economy. No formal classroom is required; a desire to read and learn will suffice. There are countless important books to consider, but the following are an excellent starting point: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat; Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt; What has Government Done to our Money? by Murray Rothbard; The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek; and Economics for Real People by Gene Callahan.
If you simply read and comprehend these relatively short texts, you will know far more than most educated people about economics and government. You certainly will develop a far greater understanding of how supposedly benevolent government policies destroy prosperity. If you care about the future of this country, arm yourself with knowledge and fight back against economic ignorance. We disregard economics and history at our own peril."

> —Ron Paul, Senator [sic] from Texas

Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets.

Again I am linking my definition. The Wikipedia references 1,2,3 are all economic textbooks and papers for this definition.

Ownership of means of production, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange and private property does mean "voluntary transaction of personal property and services" in layman's terms.

It's great you can regurgitate a definition from a book you didn't even link but you really should think about what it is you're regurgitating.

You really should read more Economics than Marx. I recommend starting with "Economics in one lesson" by Henry Hazlitt. It's a great, short read.

I would also add this to the list

Well I did read this

And then this

I'm currently on this

But I will admit, all three have said the same basic thing. Or at least, argued in the same direction. It's the cycle of "artists who sound like", where I only listen to radiohead and then porcupine tree and then bjork and then and then and then and I never hear anything new.

Give me a good contrary economic book, and if I can find it for less than 10 bucks used, I'll read it next month.

http://www.rfe.org is good first stop if you're looking for raw data

Most university library (particularly my alma mater of UC Davis) is likely to have a large selection of previously published economic journals and publications available electronically.

The Nation Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers (https://www.nber.org/) has a pretty decent selection but you have to become a member to read beyond the abstracts

http://repec.org/ is also a great source for papers, though one should note that they tend to be working papers and lack full peer review.

If you're looking to gain a greater understanding of more basic economic theory I recommend you up pick up a primer) or textbook from amazon. Thats how most people get started (either through classes or self-study).

Which is why people you need to take Economics lessons.

You can start with Economics in One Lesson.

>and the practice of landlording forces people away from home ownership by driving up prices.

No it doesn't. You clearly don't have a base understanding of economics.

Here's the first one

https://www.liberalstudies.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Economics-in-One-Lesson_2.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/#customerReviews

And here's a follow-up full of contrarian standpoints that you (really anyone) should find thought-provoking.

https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Defending_the_Undefendable_2018.pdf?file=1&type=document

Go to chapter 20 on page 165 of the pdf, it's a short read (only 2000 words or so), see if you still think what you currently do.

Dude, you are legitimately clueless. The easiest way to know? You call it trickle down, a term nobody uses, quite Literally a propaganda term. It's a term coined by FDR I believe . The only form of econ we use in the west is based off of supply side econ called Keynesian. That's it. We use a derivative of supply side econ to justify government intervention. Let me repeat that. The prevailng economic theory in the west used is based off of supply side economics. Once again, you don't know. Literally the most basic of facts and you use terms and points of analysis anyone properly educated in this field would know. That's not how investing works, it's not Called "trickle down" and you have no clue what you're talking about.




Here's a book to get you started, but based on your reading comprehension displayed so far I'm not too hopeful.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0517548232/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_nPe2Bb9SGR6R3

If you honestly believe that, there is no point in continuing this argument. I recommend you read up on some economics. A good place to start is https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1H2KMZ00AA10Z&keywords=economics+in+one+lesson+by+henry+hazlitt&qid=1570144255&sprefix=economic%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1

Did you even read what I said?

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/5hjt0i/venezuela_seizes_christmas_toys_to_distribute_to/db14hqn/?st=iwjxn7ek&sh=5db6c2c1

Economics is not a science. I've said so far that its not a science, that its a social science, and that knowledge of it is based largely on experience rather than on a formal logical system.

The fact that its not a science is irrelevant. To say that there is no value in the study of economics, and that you can't make claims about economics, given that they are imperfect and not scientifically rigorous truths, is asinine. And that is what you've said so far.

You are correct that many economists have tried to codify the principles of economics so that its like a science, particularly with the keynesians and neo keynesians. Within economic systems, certain things can be extrapolated. You can find a lot of truths in individual systems. Do they necessarily work in every sytem, all the time, to the same degree? No, they're more like a bunch of different levers you have to pull, some more at some times, some more at other times. Some systems work better with some groups of people than with other groups of people.

The reason why we haven't had ample data on socialism is because it doesnt work in practice. It always devolves too quickly to gain much data at all. Its a lovely idea, that everyone would be working for the good of everyone else and that we could implement all sorts of systems that make things better off. I bet that you could probably get it done with the japanese, they are so communally minded that they could make things work that even marx didn't dream of. The vast majority of people aren't as disciplined a people as the japanese though, and we can observe that even though they do tend towards a strong sort of isolationism and xenophobia, and towards having only japanese live in japan, that even given that that they are still importing other cultures and probably losing some of the virtues that made them so able to so widely adopt new political, economic and social systems in the past. I think that a socialist system could work, but it would probably be very isolated, and it would take a truly exceptional people to make it work.

We don't have the data on it because it takes such an exceptional people to make it work. If there are any cracks in those people, if they give in to their very human flaws, then the fact that it centralizes power so much tends to make the basis of their economies and political systems unravel.

Its simply better and more robust to not give such strong powers to the government. I find it fascinating that leftists these days are so pro socialism. Back in the 60s they were wary of "the man" and all that jazz.

I also recognize that its very likely that economists who have good views on things whom I agree with will get things wrong from time to time, but it's better to try to understand things imperfectly rather than just give up and say "oh well we can't be scientifically rigorous about this, we should just give up."

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465002609

These are economists who recognize that its not a science so much as an ongoing process that appeals to it as a social science. They know that there aren't any scientifically rigorous proofs when it comes to economics.

You should read Economics in One Lesson. It'll help you avoid saying anything as ignorant as,

>Libertarianism would appeal to me if not for letting states fuck themselves over.

• Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson
  
  
• Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics
  
  And if you just want to surf the web, Irwin Schiff's How an Economy grows and why it crashes is a good place.

I second this, also Economics in One Lesson

http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. I studied economics in college, this is the best introductory book I have come across. Many books on the subject are dry, but Hazlitt is concise and engaging.

I've also read quite a few books on investing. I think more people should take the time to learn basic money management principles. It doesn't take long to learn the basics and, if applied, it can have a big impact on your finances in the long run. Two great books that require no prior knowledge on the subject are: (1) The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing and (2) The Four Pillars of Investing.

> Giving things names does not make them true.

In my previous post i did not claim anything to be true, i claimed your assertion that supporters of free-market economics thought it fixes things "somehow". So i gave you one example on how it doesn't just "somehow" fix itself.

I invite you to read Economics in one lesson, its a good read and explains why free markets work. http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

> If a capitalist has $1mil, and they invest $100thou in a business, and the business fails, they still have 900thou.

It’s still a risk they take. Most businesses fail in the first five years. That capitalist could easily waste all of their riches. And that 100 thousand dollars that he invested in the business? (construction, research, wages etc) go to the workers and they keep it. The capitalist loses it.

> The workers they hired have nothing

They have a guaranteed wage

> "State enforced bans on slavery can prevent unskilled workers from getting jobs." That's what you sound like.

[Here, this might help.](http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1450504613&sr=8-3&keywords=basic+economics > the)

> worker is left jobless, with no chance of making money.

they have other options for employment, they could join a commune, they could get money from charity, they could get help from a mutual aid society etc

> What you say is true for small businesses, but is in no way true for the capitalist class who already have exorbitant wealth.

One of the reasons that there is such a strong upper class or “political elite” is due to government policy. Regulations and taxes that make it harder for small businesses to be successful which undercuts competition. Federal reserve policy of giving billions of dollars to already wealthy people, printing money and giving it to banks first etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX3m11pd1Rk

> When slavery, and minuscule wages were legal capitalists were happy to abuse them.

Capitalists can only pay people minuscule wages if there is no competition

> Do you know nothing of the history of capitalism?

Yes, I know the generation of wealth, improved working conditions and greater efficiency that capitalism has brought to the world. You, me and everyone else in the western world has been blessed by the accomplishments of capitalism.

> The horrible conditions in which children and the poor had to work right up until the 1960s.

The vast majority of people have been working in horrible conditions for thousands of years. Capitalism inherited that and brought a stop to it. You then blame capitalism?

>It is ridiculous to say that it is competition which ends then when history has shown time and time again that it is the state which prevented these things.

If the state did not cause slavery it wouldn’t have had to ban it. The “right” to keep slaves was upheld by the United States constitution. Even disregarding that, slavery could not exist like it did in the United States if it were not for government intervention. Keeping slaves would be too expensive in an ancap society. The government subsidised the capturing of runaway slaves and forced poor white southerners to do night watchman duty. Slave owners would have to pay for these things, likely making it cheaper to hire workers voluntarily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/3wqf54/how_do_ancap_deal_with_slavery/cxy9spu

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/comments/3wqf54/how_do_ancap_deal_with_slavery/cxyf6h0

> For example. Nestle admits to using slave labour but competition isn't bringing an end to Nestle.

Do you think people are stupid? If people cared enough about Nestle’s use of slavery they would boycott their products that use it. Nestle would then be “FORCED” (oh dear!) to comply with consumers demands. You don’t seem to understand fundamental laws of economics. Besides, companies like Hershey have said that they will stop using slave labour as a result of consumer outrage and demand for more ethical chocolate. Fair trade chocolate has increased in popularity dramatically in the last 6 years or so as a result of the outing of unethical practices used by many major chocolate companies. I personally try to make an effort to buy fair trade chocolate whenever possible. I know the power of consumer demand. Companies must comply with what consumers want in order to make a profit. That is how they make profit; by providing a service or good that consumers want.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/hershey-pledges-child-slave-labor-cocoa-production-2020-article-1.1176148


> Because other people hunted and foraged on those lands and destroying them took away those people's ability to do so

You are not entitled to use land. Someone claiming a one acre plot of land does not effect you if you live 10 kilometres away. If there is a community which relies on some land for foraging or hunting they can defend it as their property. Agriculture is also inevitable for pretty much every society regardless of capitalism so they would not need to use land that they did not directly use as they would with hunting.

> No, because all private property was originally obtained through force.

Citation needed

>. All land was originally communally owned until people used force to declare it their’s.

All land? Bullshit. There are still huge areas of unclaimed and unused land today.

> Except for the fact that you planting crops on that land takes away other people's ability to use it

You claiming ownership over anything prevents others from using it. Why do you claim ownership over your toothbrush? Your house? Your clothes? Your food? Your body? The tools in your shed? The land your house rests on? You claiming ownership over those things prevents others from using it. So I now have a right to enter your house and eat the food in your pantry, wear your clothes, sleep in your bed and piss in your garden. You were not using any of these things while you were being exploited away at work so I have a right to use them as I please. Don’t enforce your absentee “ownership” claims over your private property! I don't care if your paid for this stuff, I have a right to use it!

You see how fucking stupid that is? And don’t give me that bullshit of “hurrr thats personal not private property” they are the same thing fundamentally. Private property is not made of some special substance that personal property lacks. They are both scarce (not in unlimited quantities) and the use of them is intrinsically rivalrous by the laws of physics. We need property (systems of behaviour as to who gets to do what with what) in order to eliminate conflict over scarce resources.

> instead of having the choice of hunting or foraging at their own discretion, keeping the products of their labour, they have tto work for the capitalist and give the capitalist the products of their labour or starve.

The capitalist is actually giving them more options to obtain wealth and the means of survival but somehow you see them as reducing their options.

> Unless you believe the Qing Dynasty had a legitimate claim to ruling China?

Did Maori have a legitimate claim to the entire landmass of Aotearoa?

> Earlier you said you were referring to the Nation State when you said the State.

In that context. Notice how I said “depending on how you define a state.”
Much of this confusion is just us defining words differently.

> The thread you linked disagrees with what you are saying, given that you are defending the current status quo.

I acknowledge that the current situation is not ideal. What I am saying that we should not steal stuff from people who have done no wrong. It’s a “lessor of two evils” situation. You are also assuming that the heirs of the owners of Maori land have an interest in taking back land from people who own it today. If all stolen land were to be taken back there would be a alot of confusion over what land was obtained peacefully, people would lose their farms, houses and factories which is very likely to result in physical violence, the dairy industry will take a huge hit possibly resulting in an economic depression and the auckland airport would have to be demolished which would totally destroy the city economically and socially. It’s highly impractical.

> But they don’t.

Countdown donates food to food banks, possibly in order to make them look good so more people shop there. I know this is not the same thing (it’s in a completely different context) but the same principles still apply. Charity also gives food to people in need.

> Employment was at 100% in the Soviet Union

This really means nothing, as the eastern bloc counties employed people to do stupid things like open doors in restaurants. Just because someone is working does not mean that they are generating wealth. And when the government forces everyone to take a job of course you will have 100% employment.

> poverty increased after the fall of the Berlin Wall

I can’t find any data before 1990, could you please link to some that shows the level of poverty in the 1980’s? It appears the the soviet government was quite secretive about the state of it’s country.


http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-01-30/news/8903010453_1_soviet-officials-rubles-poverty

http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/#photo-433895)

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3m7xli/til_boris_yeltsins_faith_in_communism_was/cvd3k0w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE&index=11&list=LLspa4yhWevD1FQ66EDAIdCQ

In capitalist america, food waits for you.

In soviet russia, you wait for food!

That's completely wrong. We are forced to pay taxes (or we go to jail). The government in itself doesn't have any money so taxes makes up its revenue. That means that $17 trillion dollar debt is a debt that each American has to pay now or later with or without our consent.

Check this book out if you can: http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

> The concept of economic libertarianism depends on the notion that competition will always lead to the best winning out, but it ignores the fact that not everyone begins the race from the same starting line;

The philosophy does not ignore that. If you wish to learn about Laissez-faire economics I would start with this book http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232 It is an introductory book on the matter if only to help you better criticise it. I find that many on Reddit have a distorted cartoonist view of libertarianism, as if they learned about it from New York Times cartoons or something. I don't expect to convince more then three people of libertarianism in my lifetime, but would love to have more discussions about it with people who at least know what they are talking about.

Libertarianism is the end result of consistently applied deontological or virtue ethics. It is belief that individuals have inalienable rights that cannot be infringed by anyone.

If persons X owns himself, then person X owns his own labor. If person X owns his own labor, then persons X,Y,Z threatening him at gunpoint to hand over 10% of his labor-incomes are committing an illegitimate violent aggression and are in the moral wrong.

While libertarians could use economic arguments to argue for the political philosophy on utilitarian grounds, most would be disinterested in doing so, given that most don't even recognize utilitarian ethics as valid. The suppression and violation of the rights of the individual for a nebulous collective "greater good" is never recognized as legitimate action.

Really, there is way too much to it for a reddit post. I'd recommend reading the following and deciding for yourself:

• https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Manifesto-Ron-Paul/dp/B004IEA4D2
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Law-Frederic-Bastiat/dp/1680920634
  
  
  

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0517548232/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Qr69Ab6X58RAC

Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226264211/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_3w69Ab3PSWN8X

Automation creates a whole new world of job creation. Who designs, builds, and maintains the robots? The more accepted it becomes, the more competitive it will get. This creates even more jobs.

You're not seeing the other side of this coin. To gain insight into the indirect effects of economics, read 'Economics in One Lesson' by Henry Hazlitt.

>It does say one lesson..

Which is deceitful, and unfortunate.

I think the best intro book to Libertarian Economics is still Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazzlit. Nathaniel Branden told me Ayn Rand wouldn't bother explaining economics to him, but told him to just read this book. It's unfortunate that if we are going to have required reading in public schools, that this book isn't required reading also.

Of course Atlas Shrugged serves as a great intro as well.

The Law - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936594315/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1936594315

Economics in one lesson - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0517548232

That which is seen and is not seen - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1453857508/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1453857508

Our enemy, the state - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E28SUM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B001E28SUM

How capitalism save america - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400083311/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1400083311

New Deal or Raw Deal - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416592377/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416592377

Lessons for the Young Economist - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933550880/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1933550880

For a New Liberty - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1610162641/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1610162641

What Has Government Done to Our Money? - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/146997178X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=146997178X

America's Great Depression - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/146793481X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=146793481X

Defending the Undefendable - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933550171/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1933550171

Metldown - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596985879/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1596985879

The Real Lincoln - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761526463/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0761526463

The Road to Serfdom - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226320553/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0226320553

Capitalism and Freedom - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226264211/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0226264211

Radicals for Capitalism - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586485725/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1586485725

Production Versus Plunder - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0979987717/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0979987717

Atlas Shrugged - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452011876/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452011876

The Myth of the Rational Voter - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0691138737/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thmariwi-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0691138737

Foutainhead - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452273331/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452273331&linkCode=as2&tag=thmariwi-20

Anthem - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452281253/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452281253&linkCode=as2&tag=thmariwi-20

There are of course more books, but this should last you a few years!

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197

I read this as a freshman in college. Its a good starting point. Feel free to skim the many charts and graphs and just stay with the narrative. Very comprehensive

Check "The rise and fall of the great powers" by Paul Kennedy. http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197

Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of Great Powers is so good I have read it twice.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-Great-Powers/dp/0679720197

In there somewhere.

It is a book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0679720197

Thanks for the TL;DR.

https://www.amazon.com/Monetary-History-United-States-1867-1960/dp/0691003548

They're infatuated with central banks because they recognise that they are largely the cause of economic crisis. Hence Friedman's book, A monetary history of the United States.

> ... why can't historians agree on them?

They haven't read Friedman? The Great Depression was caused by a massive monetary contraction. Friedman believed this was due to the Fed's ineptitude. Scott Sumner seems to disagree, though I've not read his book.

http://www.amazon.com/Monetary-History-United-States-1867-1960/dp/0691003548

http://www.amazon.com/The-Midas-Paradox-Government-Depression-ebook/dp/B0181NISTW

Where would you begin? There are books dedicated to demonstrate particular instances of the gold standard being miserable.

Or we could just focus on why active adjustment of monetary policy is a good thing and provide some classic case studies of inaction. Another paper comparing policy choices.

Of course this will all probably be a waste of time if we don't first have a nice sit down chat about what inflation is.

Then they'll stubbornly ignore it as they've ignored more articulate criticisms of the gold standard. Might be slightly bitter about a past post on economic policy.

[Couldn't think of a pithy comment about fiscal hawks and Europe. Also lacking a good book on the panic of 1907.Shoutout to Kindleberg's Lender of Last Resort Relevant for the End the Feddies.]

Here are some books I was able to dig up myself, are they any good?

A Practical Guide to Transportation and Logistics

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

How To Become A Successful Freight Broker: My Journey from Fast Food Manager to Freight Broker

Okay, here goes the barrage of questions then. Forgive me for asking a lot of random questions...

• I'm pretty familiar with DFW, and lived there for some time, liked it a lot- not a bad area to live in, pretty cheap. Used to avoid heading south of downtown Dallas at all costs- definitely not an area that I would want to get lost in at night, if you know where I'm going with that. Are you in South Dallas, or south OF Dallas, heading towards Waco? How gritty/bad of an area is it?
  
  
  
• What's the average life of a diesel engine? Are overhauls required/highly recommended after a certain period, like how airplane engines have A/B/C checks?
  
  
  
• What do you do day-to-day?
  
  
  
• What's the size of the DC you serve (sq ft), and is it dry, reefer, mixed, what?
  
  
  
• In general terms, what kind of product do you push around (food, other household consumables, industrial, etc)?
  
  
  
• Does the DC you serve do break-bulk on pallets, or mostly just full pallets of the same SKU? How much automation is in it?
  
  
  
• What's the average life for tires on a truck and/or trailer?
  
  
  
• Do you have dedicated in-house mechanics for your fleet, or how does the maintenance program work?
  
  
  
• Does your fleet do mostly regional driving, more OTR, or what?
  
  
  
• What are you thoughts on APUs? Does your fleet use them? Why / why not?
  
  
  
• Average/typical cost of a tractor? Of a trailer?
  
  
  
• Weirdest reasons/excuses for missing the delivery time? I'll occasionally hear a "Driver quit" or "Driver had accident" kind of thing in my job, but nothing too crazy.
  
  
  
• How crazy does your life get in December and right around/before major holidays? I know that for shippers, trying to get trucks around that time can be a total PITA, but I'm curious how different it is for you, given that you run dedicated freight.
  
  
  
• Are you technically a trucking company, a 3PL, what? I'm a bit new to supply chain and don't know enough about the transportation side of it.
  
  
  
• Any good books/resources you'd recommend for someone looking to learn more about the transportation and DC sides of supply chain? For supply chain "beach reading", I highly recommend The Box, which is a great read about the history of the shipping container and how it has changed the world.
  
  
  
• Is there any way to make trucking transportation more efficient? It seems to me that it would be hard to eek much more productivity out of the system given that there are time limits on the drivers and weight limits on the trucks, but I'm curious to get your take on that.
  
  
  
• Does your fleet use truck skirts (or whatever the cheap steel panels along the bottom sides of the trailers are called), or anything else to try to get better mileage or help the environment?
  
  
  
• Average load/unload times in your operation? Do you typically deliver to a single destination, or multistop?
  
  
  
• Your biggest hassle? Biggest worry? Biggest "I love this job!" moment?
  
  
  
• Any other fun/weird/crazy stories?

I have a container in my side yard that I use as a shed. It made a fairly large Lull lift work hard to get it in place and in this image they look like toys!
I'm facinated by the container industry, The Box is a great book about it if you are interested.

Malcolm McLean is one of those guys like Norman Borlaug that absolutely revolutionized the modern world but that don't get the wider recognition that they deserve.

Great book about the container revolution and Mclean:

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

> when have we ever increased our population by billions within decades?

Increased population means increased markets, more people producing but also more desires to satisfy.

> worldwide production per worker is also exploding do to automation.

This is a good thing. This is the foundation of economic progress.

> These factors are unprecedented.

Every generation says this. It's always "different this time".

> Take trucking... It is a low skilled job.

Your "low-skill job" didn't exist three hundred years ago (when people were running around smashing mechanical looms and making the same arguments about the destruction of society because clearly society stops functioning when we can produce cheaper textiles right?). Hell, how many people could pilot a 12+ tonne combustion engine driven vehicle travelling 100 km/h one hundred years ago?

You don't realise how quickly people forget and accept skills as normal, and then delegate them to low-skill! Fifty years ago the smartest investment an independent girl could make was to take typing school so she could operate a typewriter and be a secretary - nowadays kids grow up with an iPhone in their cot.

> It can easily be automated

And it SHOULD because it will make EVERYTHING cheaper. Why do you want things to be expensive? There will always be some losers from an economic change, but why do you think they are more important than the 99.99% of humanity which will benefit?

You should read the following book: https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408

It is a fascinating glimpse into how this economic world you take for granted came into being. 100 years ago, you see, you know how transport worked? People loaded ships by hand. Crates, barrels, bags, everything was carried by hand and loaded into small ships. Ships spent the majority of their time in docks, transport costs were enormous. Containerised shipping slashed transit times and prices.

You know what people did? Dockworkers fought tooth and nail to prevent it. Your whole trucking industry only came into being because they didn't succeed. And everyone in the whole world benefitted, because everything got cheaper.

Economies are complex. People can and will adapt. Some people don't pay attention and adapt too slowly. Bad luck to them. You will not make anything better or save anybody by trying to stop change to save them from themselves.

/r/SecurityAnalysis maintain a decent reading list.

The following is taken from it:

History

• A History of Financial Speculation - Edward Chancellor
  
  
• A Short History of Financial Euphoria - Kenneth Galbraith
  
  
• Barbarians at The Gate - Bryan Burruough
  
  
• Irrational Exuberance - Robert Shiller
  
  
• Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
  
  
• Manias, Panics and Crashes - Charles Kindleberger
  
  
• Money of the Mind - James Grant
  
  
• Oil 101 - Morgan Downey
  
  
• The Box - Marc Levinson
  
  
• The Prize - Daniel Yergin
  
  
• The Big Short - Michael Lewis
  
  
• The Great Crash of 1929 - Kenneth Galbraith
  
  
• The Panic of 1907 - Robert Brunner
  
  
• The Predators Ball - Connie Bruck
  
  
• This Time Is Different - Rogoff & Reinhart
  
  
• Too Big to Fail - Andrew Ross Sorkin
  
  
• US Bank Deregulation in A Historical Perspective - Charles Calomiris
  
  
• When Genius Failed - Roger Lowenstein
  

You are really stupid. Let me quote from your response, "Africa and Mexico did not have the same resources as Britain". Britain got cheap resources from America and Africa. Remember colonialism? Africans had cheap resources, they just didn't know how to exploit them like the British did. The Industrial Revolution happened in Britain due to a hundreds of years of eugenics. http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393692365&sr=8-1&keywords=a+farewell+to+alms Half your post is also off topic and irrelevant to the conversation.

It's the full text of the book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by Anthony Sutton. Voltairenet is not the source.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X

Thanks for the recommendation. I already have a copy of Steve Keen's Debunking Economics in the mail, so I'll have that to work through first, but I'll be sure to check it out.

there are a few books you can read on it. i just got this in the mail
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004G606EY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Recently there was an interview on NPR with the author of 1493 that proposed the rise of african slavery was partly due to the fact they were more resistant to mosquito bites than the white man. Europeans would bring their servants across and most would die within a year, the africans were much hardier and more desirable.

https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X

​

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Enemy-Money-Can-Buy/dp/1939438233

​

https://www.amazon.com/East-minus-West-zero-862-1962/dp/B0007EGOLI

​

etc

​

Marshall and Mao, shutting out CKS

Do you happen to know how accurate the information in 1493 is? I find the book fascinating, but it seems similar to GG&S and I know it was not written by a historian.

And this shit is not on top of Reddit yet after 13 hours, but Obama's lying ass stating that 'blasphemy' should not be banned is?!!! This is why I don't give a rat's ass about the ignorant masses, seriously! I care to fight for my family, friends, and those who do fucking care for their freedom from these tyrants and despots! All these neocons (most of whom follow the philosophy of Leo Strauss and are called straussians) and their rhetoric are always stated in exact opposition to what they believe themselves and their agendas; they love to be hypocrites and use reverse psychological means to project their insanity.

AIPAC is a orgnaization run by jesuits and zionists, and they've been using Israel as the base of operations to 'foment' conflict, war, and death in the middle-east or asia minor or the arab region of this world. Even real jewish rabbi's know that zionism is all but a farce not mentioned one time in the torah. Out of the so-called 12 tribes of jews, 10 are living in america, yet this zionist and jesuit propaganda continue to drill out media lies about the threat of the holy land shit - which does in fact belong to the palestinians who were living there first for the last couple of centuries or more.

All wars from the last century unto the present day were all fabricated and fomented by the jesuits and elites for corporate gains and power, including the big lie called 'the jewish holocaust!' video and book reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyMVWVBmGVo and Antony Sutton's regarding wall street's involvement in these fake wars http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X

Don't buy into the lies! Jesse Ventura will explain it better than me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MAmJ9oAy1mc

OWNtheNWO: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFklTLNy8c

http://www.amazon.com/Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Antony-Sutton/dp/190557035X

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFklTLNy8c

http://www.amazon.com/Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Antony-Sutton/dp/190557035X

The ultra-rich elite destroying Western Civilization are the Globalist/Capitalists. You have traitorous European 'royalty' like the House of Windsor, you have the Council of 300, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, DynCorp, etc, along with the source of money, the network of central banks run by the IMF and the Bank of International Settlements, and the World Bank. Down to the local branches like the US Federal Reserve. This cabal is made up of Jews and traitorous European Whites, who believe in a Globalist Technocracy, that sees national borders, national identities, etc., as arbitrary boundaries to the movement of resources and capital.


As far as the claim that Wall Street bankers funded the Bolshevik revolution, that is very well documented. Kuhn Loeb and Schiff had a vested interest in overthrowing the Russian Tsar, and also desired to erect an enemy for the American/Capitalist military industrial complex to churn against. I'll copy and paste some excerpts here, and link the source material below:


In 1905, while Russia was engaged in the Russo-Japanese War, the Communists tried to get the farmers to revolt against the Czar, but they refused. [Many of the leaders, including Lenin and Trotsky were exiled --ed].

After this aborted attempt, the Czar deposited $400,000,000 in the Chase Bank, National City Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, the Hanover Trust Bank, and Manufacturers Trust Bank, and $80,000,000 in the Rothschild Bank in Paris, because he knew who was behind the growing revolutionary movement, and hoped to end it.

The Rothschilds, through Milner, planned the Russian Revolution, and along with Schiff (who gave $20 million), Sir George Buchanan, the Warburgs, the Rockefellers, the partners of J.P. Morgan (who gave at least $1 million), Olaf Aschberg (of the Nye Bank of Stockholm, Sweden), the Rhine Westphalian Syndicate, a financier named Jovotovsky (whose daughter later married Leon Trotsky), William Boyce Thompson (a director of Chase National Bank who contributed $1 million), and Albert H. Wiggin (President of Chase National Bank), helped finance it.

The Rockefellers had given their financial support after the Czar refused to give them access to the Russian oil fields, which were already being pumped by the Royal Dutch Co. (owned by the Rothschilds and the Nobel brothers) and giving Standard Oil plenty of competition on the international market. Even though John D. Rockefeller possessed $15,000,000 in bonds from the Royal Dutch Co. and Shell, rather than purchase stock to get his foot in the door and indirectly profit, he helped to finance the Revolution so that he would be able to get Standard Oil firmly established in the country of Russia. As the Congress of Vienna (1814) had shown, the Illuminati had never been able to control the affairs of Russia, so they had to get rid of the Czar so he couldn't interfere with their plans.

Leon Trotsky Returns from New York
Leon Trotsky (whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879-1940, the son of wealthy Jewish parents), was exiled from Russia because of his part in the aborted revolution in 1905 and was a reporter for Novy Mir, a communist paper in New York, from 1916-17. He had an expensive apartment and traveled around town in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He sometimes stayed at the Krupp mansion, and had been seen going in and out of Schiff's New York mansion.

Leon Trotsky was given $20 million in Jacob Schiff gold to help finance the revolution, which was deposited in a Warburg bank, then transferred to the Nya Banken (Nye Bank) in Stockholm, Sweden. According to the Knickerbocker Column in the New York Journal American on February 3, 1949:

"Today it is estimated by Jacob's grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about $20,000,000 for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia."


https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Bolshevik-Revolution-Capitalists/dp/190557035X


https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_the_bolshevik_revolution-5.pdf (this is a free text version of the amazon book listed above)


http://www.timesofisrael.com/trotskys-day-out-how-a-visit-to-nyc-influenced-the-bolshevik-revolution/


http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FinalWarning&C=7.3


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFklTLNy8c (How Wall Street Funded the Bolshevik Revolution)


http://www.wildboar.net/multilingual/easterneuropean/russian/literature/articles/whofinanced/whofinancedleninandtrotsky.html

Speaking of Banker Fronts - The Bolsheviks in Russia were funded - indirectly according to some sources - by bankers in London and New York. Even the New York Times admits that the Bolsheviks were given a loan in exchange for fighting against Germany, despite the fact that the Provisional Government at the time wanted peace. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's textbook US policy or carelessness. For instance, arming the Taliban to fight Russia and helping Iraq to fight Iran.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/07/opinion/us-aid-to-the-bolsheviks.html

>To avert bankruptcy, the Provisional Government sought assistance from allies - America, Britain, France, Italy. Woodrow Wilson sent a mission to assess conditions and discuss aid[...]
>
>The key personality and leader was an elderly former Secretary of State, Elihu Root. A conservative Republican, Root undertook his assignment with reluctance, a patronizing attitude toward Russia and ignorance of changes taking place there[...] After the mission reached the capital, Petrograd (now Leningrad), Root talked extensively with the Kerensky administration but made no serious effort to contact non-establishment groups such as the Bolsheviks. After three weeks, he was prepared to recommend loans and credits. But there was one key condition - Russia must continue to fight Germany[...]To survive financially, the Provisional Government agreed. All told, American credits came to $325 million, of which $185 million was disbursed. Kerensky launched a new offensive against Germany in July. After initial successes, Russian troops retreated in disarray. The domestic political consequences were instant. Confidence in the Provisional Government plunged. The Bolsheviks gained and became a major force.

Even the Jerusalem Post had this to say:

https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Was-the-Russian-Revolution-Jewish-514323

>The roughly three million Jews of the Soviet Union at the time of the revolution constituted the largest Jewish community in the world, but they were only around 2% of the USSR’s population. They were concentrated in the Pale of Settlement (a western region of Imperial Russia) and in Ukraine and Belarussia, where they were 5% to 10% of the population, whereas in Russia itself the 1926 census found only 600,000 Jews.
>
>As a group in the vastness of the USSR, they were one of the largest minorities, alongside Georgians, Armenians, Turks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgiz, Tartars, Moldovians, Poles and Germans. None of these other groups played such a central role in the revolution, although members of many of them rose to senior levels.

​

​

>I don't have to be right about anything on reddit. So, somehow, you have the answers. You! I must listen to YOU!!

Sure you do. That's why you keep commenting. And your mischaracterizing my comments as me claiming to have all the answers as well as insulting me just further proves the weakness of your argument.

>If it was the Communists that Kennedy was talking about, why wouldn't he have said it?

Because he did. Multiple times. Read the first few paragraphs. Again. I even took the trouble of highlighting in a previous post all the instances where he did talk about Communism.

Again, your problem is you spend a lot of time trying to reinforce your beliefs, so much so that you let emotion become a factor. Again, like a sophist.

>In my humble opinion, he was focused on the central bankers who have controlled America since 1913.

He was. And those bankers have ties to Communism. Read Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by Antony Sutton, among other things.

>You may disagree with me, and that is fine. But, I will stick with my assumption until I am proven otherwise.


as·sump·tion

əˈsəm(p)SH(ə)n/

noun

1.

a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof.

What's amusing is that everything I have said is backed by proof, but you would rather continue to have assumptions. This whole conversation is a classic case of cognitive dissonance and dissonance reduction right here.